In my last article, “Scrabble Spells Doom for the Racial Hypothesis of Intelligence,” I argued that Africans should not be able to come anywhere near dominating the games of Scrabble (both English and French) or professional checkers, as they apparently do, if their real biological intelligence was anywhere near as low as their nominal IQ scores might indicate. Although these board games evidently require very high intelligence at the top competitive world championship level (not necessarily at the home level with your dad), and attract extremely nerdy math types, they have the specific advantage of not being too affected by the well-known learning/training resource gaps that exist between rich and poor populations.

My argument is therefore not against the low IQ score estimates for African nations (by Richard Lynn, et al), but whether this reflects some restrictive racially linked genetic cause. If it is indeed basically genetic, it should practically be impossible to find any area of relative cognitive performance of Africans that is inconsistent with this large IQ deficit with whites and other groups.

If, on the other hand, the cause is basically environmental (specifically, learning resource deficiencies), then some exceptions are bound to exist and these will predictably only be found in areas in which the cognitive challenges are high but the learning resource requirements (books, well-trained teachers etc) are extremely minimal. Performance on such cognitively demanding but bookless contests will far exceed even academic areas that are light on cognitive demands but heavy on book learning (eg soft subjects like sociology etc, where you still find no Africans at the top). The genetic Racial Hypothesis predicts that the gap should be even bigger in favor of whites as you go to the more naturally complex contests like Scrabble (see Spearman’s Hypothesis.) In short, if there was to be any exception to inferior African intellectual performance, it should have been in the softer fields where there are less of the gifted math types to contend with.

The Chess Question

Modern chess, like modern mathematics, does not have this book-free quality, which is why the differences in chess performance even among nations with similar nominal IQs are so large. Countries like the former Soviet Union invested heavily in the academization of chess, such that even great players like the American Bobby Fischer had to learn Russian just to keep up with their ever-expanding libraries of books. (The recent advancement in computer chess programs should make the future of chess quite different, especially as computing devices also become cheaper.)

However, as I noted in the Scrabble article, this is not merely an excuse for African chess performance (even putatively high IQ countries like Japan and Korea that have less exposure to the academic culture of chess, are not so great at the game and have no grandmasters). The easiest proof that Africans are also not biologically disadvantaged at chess is that in multiracial South Africa, there is only one chess grandmaster and he just happens to be black. Kenny Solomon only learned to play chess at the age of 13 and was exposed to only one chess book (just like the Zambian grandmaster, Amon Simutowe), a disadvantage that was faced by virtually no other grandmaster in any other part of the world.

South Africa’s first chess grandmaster, Kenny Solomon.

The quantitative argument here is that if there is a large average cognitive gap in potential chess ability between blacks and whites, this gap will be most conspicuous at the highest levels of performance. You have the opposite result in South African chess, contrary to what prominent racial hypothesizers like Gregory Cochran expect.

Blogging about a highly distinguished South African physicist of Jewish descent, Neil Turok, who believes that black Africans could academically perform as well as once-poor Ashkenazi Jews historically did when they became exposed to high quality education, Cochran calls him smart but “crazy.” Cochran then appeals to Turok’s common sense by asking him to look at his own personal experience with black South Africans on different brainy contests:

And he has no excuse …He grew up in South Africa: there are plenty of things he would have seen if this picture of the world were true, and he’s never seen any of them. Did black kids out-argue him, beat him at chess, …?

As Thomas Sowell has noted, it is always fascinating to see how confidently intellectuals speak about the direct experiences of other people that they don’t have themselves (like journalists telling “crazy” cops that they should have just easily shot the armed mad man in the leg instead of the head!)

If the first and only chess grandmaster in South Africa is a black man from a poor community (in a country that has had some pretty strong Jewish chess players), as is the only South African to reach super-grandmaster ranking in professional Anglo American checkers (Lubabalo Kondlo), then perhaps Turok’s personal experience as a kid playing chess and checkers with black South African kids may not be as obvious as Cochran boldly presumes. After all, Cochran himself believes that if there is a large ability gap between two groups, this difference will be most conspicuous at the highest levels of ability (like reaching grandmaster level?)

At this point, I am willing to wager that it is not Neil Turok who is “smart but crazy.”

The Scrabble for Africa?

Professor James Thompson, a British psychologist from University College London who has kindly critiqued a number of my IQ articles, responded to my Scrabble article with his own craftily titled “The Scrabble for Africa.” African interest in board games was indeed quite influenced by the European colonial period that followed the famous “scramble for Africa.” France was at the time a dominant force in the game of checkers and the countries in Africa today that have given the toughest challenge to the historical state-sponsored Russian dominance of the game are all former French colonies. Scrabble is a more recent game.

In The Scrabble for Africa, Dr. Thompson acknowledges that this line of research could plausibly pose a problem for the racial genetic hypothesis, although he proposes a statistical test to save it from immediate falsification:

I will take Nigerian IQ70 as the estimate to be disproved, and the Rindermann estimate of African intelligence of IQ75 (which makes allowances for sample deficiencies) as the best estimate for Africa as a whole.

If Nigerian IQ is 70 there will be 5,764 Nigerians with an IQ of 130 and above. Some of them will play Scrabble. If really good Scrabble playing requires an IQ of 140, then there will be 278 Nigerians able to excel at this game.

If Nigerian IQ is in fact at the Rindermann estimate for Africa of 75, then there will be 22,362 Nigerians with an IQ of 130 and above, and 1,336 Nigerians with an IQ of 140.

It is always good when someone puts up a statistical model that could potentially refute their own hypothesis if their calculations or assumptions are wrong; it makes everyone’s job easier. In the past when I have corrected the assumptions in the statistical calculations of HBD enthusiasts, they have not contested my corrections, and yet they have still soldiered on with their unwavering faith!

So, all I have to do (again) is see if the math does indeed work to defend Thompson’s favored genetic hypothesis.

Omitted Conditions

Before we even look at the omissions in Thompson’s calculations, it is surprising that he does not see that these small numbers of high IQ people in the Nigerian population (particularly if top level Scrabble requires IQ 140) makes it highly unlikely that such a large fraction of them would commit themselves to playing Scrabble, as the best means of taking advantage of their supposedly rare intellects in a very poor country.

And yet even these small numbers of high IQ potential Scrabble champions are still gross over-estimates when we factor in the omissions in Thompson’s calculations:

1. AGE FACTOR

Dr. Thompson forgot that his final estimates include Nigerians with that IQ at all ages. Thus, even a 2 year old with an IQ of at least 140 is included in his estimate of how many Nigerians can play “really good” Scrabble (remember that your IQ score is only measured against your peers in age or close age range). The only people whose IQ is applicable for these calculations are the adult Nigerians (all of these world class players are safely above age 20-25).

One therefore has to factor that in by looking at the demographics of Nigeria and excluding at least all the toddlers. Dr. Thompson’s final estimate will have to be cut down by more than half!

But the missing cuts don’t end there.

2. GENDER FACTOR

The second factor he does not consider is that all of these top Scrabble players are men. His final estimate includes both males and females who would be above that IQ. The number would have to be cut down further (and there are fewer males than females in Nigeria, like most countries, so it has to be cut by more than half here again).

3. BRAIN DRAIN

Dr. Thompson himself also tells us that half of these top elites have left Nigeria for greener pastures in the West, according to a report he found in the Economist, but for some reason he does not include such a large factor into his calculations. What should make this factor even more significant is that most of those Nigerian emigrants have historically been male, which reduces even further the men available in Nigeria to play Scrabble at that IQ.

The female share of US immigrants from selected countries of birth, 1980-2013. Source: Migrationpolicy.org

So, we have approximately 30 men or less in Nigeria who are supposedly the African equivalent of Manhattan Project scientists, and just about all of them – there were approximately 30 Nigerians on the world top 100 list in 2015 – have decided to dedicate themselves to Scrabble? Life can’t be that depressing even in Nigeria!

Randomly assuming that Nigeria may have IQ 75 instead of 70 still doesn’t fix this reductio ad absurdum.

And it gets much worse when you take this analysis to the other African countries with much smaller populations. I don’t know why Dr. Thompson neglected to show us how his calculations would work on Gabon (the country that was most prominent in my own rough statistical argument), which has less than 2 million people and an IQ of 64 but regularly produces top world championship Scrabble players. As a defender of your hypothesis, you should normally tackle the hardest cases to show how they happily survive the biggest hits from the opposition. The math fails miserably for Gabon, even without a single correction to his assumptions.

The Biggest Mistake?

If there is any chance of saving Thompson’s calculations, it becomes obliterated when you discover (through reverse engineering his concealed steps) the Standard Deviation he employed in his calculations: he apparently used a wrong SD for the distribution of black IQ (wrong, at least according to hereditarian IQ literature itself, assuming blacks in Africa are like blacks in America.)

Under the “correct” black SD, there should actually be no Nigerians who exist at the 140 IQ level. This is not just a problem for Scrabble, it also implies that there should be no Nigerians at any level of intellectual achievement that requires IQ 140. It means no single Nigerian can ever win the National Merit scholarship, for example, as it requires just about that level of IQ. The fact that there have been such Nigerians, like National Merit winner, Justin Otor (Igbo), who also attended one of the most selective gifted schools in America, or Saheela Ibrahim (Yoruba), whose equivalent SAT scores would put her well above the National Merit threshold despite writing the SAT when she was only 14 or 15, is of course a statistical anomaly for the racial hypothesis. And all those Nigerian students in the UK who achieve the highest GCSE score in the whole country and proceed to Cambridge Med School, like Chidera Ota and her sister, would have had to achieve that by some other mysterious means, not high intelligence. (African witchcraft, perhaps?)

Dr. Thompson has in the past criticized my endless use of such concrete examples of high achieving black Africans because he assumed I was making the common street fallacy of offering tail-end performers as sufficient evidence against the racial hypothesis (“here’s one black guy who is smart, so you’re wrong that blacks have lower average IQ”). In fact, my endless examples have two purposes: firstly, these stories seem to be much more common among Africans than native black Americans, which should not happen if the IQ gap between black Africans and black Americans is 15 and biological (hereditarians believe the partial white genes in black Americans gives them a lot of that cognitive advantage).

Wouldn’t it be strange if Ashkenazi Jews had much fewer real-world academic achievements despite having a 12 point IQ advantage? So, why isn’t it strange that every year when Harvard and all the other Ivy League Colleges strangely admit the same lucky black kid, it is almost always an “African” kid (eg 2016 and 2017)? Why was the first black Harvard Law Review president a child of an African, as well as the first female black president of the same prestigious journal (2017)? Suddenly racial hereditarians will blame something other than “genes” since those are pointing in the wrong direction for them!

The second reason we use these concrete examples of achivers is that they also perform at a level where they simply should not exist in the real world, statistically speaking, given their population IQ, standard deviation, etc.

The right standard deviation for the distribution of black IQ, according to hereditarian literature, is 12, not 15 as Thompson’s calculations assume. Racial hypothesist Gregory Cochran pointed this out to his loyal fans at his popular blog, and some of these followers have since attempted to dutifully correct Thompson’s habitual use of 15 instead of 12 for blacks. The original source for SD 12 is the exhaustive hereditarian Bible itself: “The g Factor” by Arthur Jensen. It’s what is experimentally found for black Americans on different tests.

If Thompson is consciously electing to assume that continental African SD is more like that of white Americans (15) than black Americans (12), then that counter-intuitive choice would pose even bigger problems for the racial hypothesis since it theoretically treats American blacks as cognitively representative of blacks everywhere, except with the advantage of partial whiteness (which should in fact raise the SD). Cochran himself has frequently argued that the failure of black Americans to make significant intellectual achievements in a developed country (where they have lived for hundreds of years) is proof of the black race’s lower genetic intelligence. This argument would be automatically falsified if the SD of black Americans was that much lower than black Africans. After all, the smaller gender SD gap is also proposed as a likely explanation for the conspicuously lower female intellectual achievements.

Fat Tail?

Fat chance.

Under the racial hypothesis, you cannot explain the presence of Africans at such high levels of cognitive performance even if you assume a “fat tail” – the idea that there are more people at the highest ends than a strict Gaussian distribution would allow. If a statistical fat tail can help Gabon to reach such high levels of performance, why doesn’t the fat tail of white women players (of any cognitive game) also come to their rescue since they are supposed to have even more of them at that level of cognitive ability than any African country? Or more directly, why doesn’t the fat tail help the white (male) children who are supposed to be the IQ equivalent of African adult brains and who, according to some hereditarian bloggers, are supposedly more passionate with the same board games than adults?

Finally, if the fat tail is helping Africans here, then logically, it should also help them achieve at the top of other (academic) areas, where such an IQ would be useful. If you claim that it only works with cognitive games and not academic fields, then that’s a concession that learning resource deficits are the only explanation for lower African IQ or scholastic test scores, which means you can’t also use intellectual achievement comparisons as your evidence for cognitive differences. The same argument goes for why proposing an outlier subpopulation can’t work. You have to decide whether you want to have your cake or eat it.

IQ 115 for Scrabble Champs?

Thompson and others may now just insist that “really good” world championship level Scrabble has to take only around 115 IQ or less since at IQ 140 or even 130, the math doesn’t look good for them; the show has to continue!

And then of course I will be obliged to reply by pointing out once again that you can’t just ignore all the empirical evidence that makes such a “low” real IQ implausible for the top Scrabble champions:

The “really good” top of the Scrabble world has a gender gap that is similar to the gender gap in top level physics, mathematics, economics, or even musical composition etc: as you go very high in all such cognitive performance, the gender gap grows sharply. That gender separation does not happen at any activity requiring IQs as low as 115, which in fact sometimes favor women (eg college graduation rates?).And no, the gender disparity at higher levels is not because women are less competitive. Girls in high school are just as competitive as boys when it comes to other challenging cognitive contests like the Spelling Bee, even slightly outperforming the boys. But when they try to bring that same energy to Scrabble, they fail to understand why they can’t “outspell” the boys any more, despite their higher interest in this word game. No one understood this until it was realized that competitive Scrabble is in fact much more like a math test than a spelling bee contest, and math has never been the greater strength of the fairer gender, especially at the most selective levels. Thus, the best ever American kid in Scrabble (Mack Meller) also just happens to be the best kid in KenKen, the Japanese math game with no words (I think he might also be Jewish).

The extreme over-representation of Ashkenazi Jews at the top of Scrabble achievement also follows the same pattern as in physics, mathematics, etc. The New York Times has reported that most of the American Scrabble champions have been of Jewish descent. I also investigated this question further and, using one or two of Ron Unz’s selected Jewish names in an article he wrote about stealth ethnic bias in elite college admissions, I found a large over-representation of Jewish names among the Scrabble club players of North America.This large list has over 14,000 players (almost ten times the number in Nigeria, according to an email I received from the Nigerian Scrabble Federation, which should dispel the silly suggestion by some HBD bloggers that Africans just have higher participation on this American word game, despite their alarmingly low literacy rates; France apparently also has more players – 16,000 – than all African Francophone countries combined, as the official International French Scrabble website indicates; Senegal, historically the most active African country in French Scrabble, only has 750 club players, which makes the statistical calculations even more impossible for the racial hypothesis).On the American list, the name Cohen/Cohn/Cohan appears 38 times; names with “Gold-” appear 70 times while (probably mostly Jewish) names ending in “-stein” appear 110 times. By contrast, the most common surname in America, ‘Smith,’ appears only 104 times. (Note: I’m still patiently waiting for someone to explain to me how a 3 IQ point gender gap prevents Jewish white women from reaching Jewish white male performance on any cognitive contest, but a 45 IQ point gap does not stop African men to challenge same Jewish men!)

The over-representation of math majors on top level Scrabble. Since the population of mathematicians or math majors in the world is extremely small, due to the simple fact that math is not simple, what is the probability that they could be over-represented at the top of any other field that does not require similarly high selective levels of (mathematical) intelligence? It’s mathematically impossible.

Following from the logic of 3, the very fact that you have a world champion (among a handful of world champions) who was a twice Putnam Prize winner should close the case, statistically speaking. The number of Putnam Fellows is tiny even among the tiny group of math majors, which means that you logically shouldn’t have any of them winning any other popular “prize” that does not result from exactly the same unique mental advantage required to win the Putnam. In short, a Putnam Fellow statistically has zero chance of distinguishing himself on any popular contest in which an IQ of 130 (or even 140, really) would be sufficient for distinction. This is more evidence that our 140 IQ may itself be a conservative estimate for world championship level of play.

Finally, some cognitive psychologists (who did not have our arguments above) have actually tested some top Scrabble players of the US and found them to score extremely highly on different professionally conducted cognitive tests – scoring significantly above students of an elite college. In fact, as one commenter in our last article keenly observed, the authors of that paper apparently used wrong SAT scores for their control group of students, by forgetting that SAT correlation with IQ has changed over time. This means that the (older) Scrabble players in their sample had significantly higher IQs than was assumed from their older SAT scores, which makes their superior cognitive scores actually unsurprising.

The researchers were surprised that the Scrabble experts scored a standard deviation on cognitive scores above the students with similar SAT scores, and yet their recentered SAT scores would suggest that this is exactly how they should perform on the cognitive tests (they thus inadvertently proved that SAT scores are quite highly correlated with real cognitive ability). The actual average IQ score of these elite Scrabble players, derived directly from their SAT scores, would be approximately 145. An anonymous commenter in 2015 independently calculated that the elite American Scrabble players have average IQ of 143!

It should also be noted that these high IQ Scrabble players in the sample only represented the top 2 percent in selection, which is lower than the top world championship group that the top Africans face. Thus, the sample had 23% women. Since Scrabble is a math game, as we’ve noted, it is interesting that the gender ratio in this selective Scrabble sample was quite exactly the gender ratio for the famously selective “Study for Mathematically Precocious Youth” (see Thompson, 2016)? Just another coincidence?

The Mind Sports Academy, the organizers of world championships in several cognitive games (including Scrabble, chess, Go, etc) have decided to build a more robust rating system that compares player strengths within one cognitive game and across to the other “mind sports.” Their current top ten Scrabble ratings for Team USA apparently has quite a few Ashkenazi Jewish “suspects,” but no women:

A little side note: the highest ranked name in this top ten list by Mind Sports Academy is actually a Nigerian immigrant; and he happens to be the only American who makes it to the top ten list of the world (but that’s totally besides the point!).

CONCLUSION

We can ignore all the statistical arguments and actual testing evidence indicating that the world champion level players would exceed IQ 140 or perhaps even IQ 150 (since Putnam Fellows have won, but no women have won), and conservatively assume that only IQ 130 is needed for such extreme distinction. There should still (statistically) be no single person from African countries like Gabon. And yet they exist, constantly outperforming math professors and computer scientists from the developed world. That’s a statistical problem for the racial hypothesis but it is not a problem at all for the alternative hypothesis: the African nominal national IQs are artificially depressed by more than 30 IQ points due to an extremely deficient cognitive environment. To defiantly ignore the strong significance of these obvious resource gaps, you probably have to be very smart. And crazy.

1) Do we have firm evidence about the genetic makeup of these players from Gabon et al?

2) Even at 70 mean and 12sd, a 130 IQ is only 5 standard deviations away, which means the top 0.006% will have a 130 IQ and above, even without taking into account fat tails. That’s more than 100 people in Gabon alone.

3) The author assumes that “of course all the smart people wouldn’t just play board games” … the research on IQ gaps suggests the opposite. People at the extreme edges of IQ are usually socially isolated and incomprehensible to their peers. I imagine this is only exacerbated in Africa where intelligence isn’t prized like it is in the west. I would expect even more severe nerd in-grouping among intelligent Africans.

Is there even such a thing as an "African nerd"?
There clearly are African-American nerds (and i have known a few, but only a few). And they are pretty much nerds in the same way as white American nerds.
Whether there are Asian-American nerds is a more complex question. Obviously the answer is yes in many ways. Real nerds do not really care about racial differences on a personal level, and anyone familiar with nerds knows that Asians and whites and others intermix. But the difference between Asian-American "nerds" and other Asian-Americans is in many ways less extreme than with other races, so far as I grasp it.
Maybe what I'm getting at is this: maybe being a "nerd" is more or less a white thing, and African-American nerds take on the role since that is more or less what is available. (Assuming they don't want to be an overtly "Africanist" figure like Cornel West.)
But in Africa, apart from pieces of South Africa, there are no white nerds. (Whites in other parts of Africa just are not going to be nerds.) The role is not available for the taking. Perhaps an African at the very high end of the IQ scale is going to construe his position as nothing other than an entry point into global, world culture, and will have no qualms about entering.

2) Even at 70 mean and 12sd, a 130 IQ is only 5 standard deviations away, which means the top 0.006% will have a 130 IQ and above, even without taking into account fat tails. That’s more than 100 people in Gabon alone.

No, your math is completely wrong. There should not be "more than 100 people" in Gabon at that IQ and SD. There should be ZERO -- or *less* than 1 person (even without correcting your elevated IQ 70 for Gabon).

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1) Do we have firm evidence about the genetic makeup of these players from Gabon et al?

2) Even at 70 mean and 12sd, a 130 IQ is only 5 standard deviations away, which means the top 0.006% will have a 130 IQ and above, even without taking into account fat tails. That's more than 100 people in Gabon alone.

3) The author assumes that "of course all the smart people wouldn't just play board games" ... the research on IQ gaps suggests the opposite. People at the extreme edges of IQ are usually socially isolated and incomprehensible to their peers. I imagine this is only exacerbated in Africa where intelligence isn't prized like it is in the west. I would expect even more severe nerd in-grouping among intelligent Africans.

Is there even such a thing as an “African nerd”?
There clearly are African-American nerds (and i have known a few, but only a few). And they are pretty much nerds in the same way as white American nerds.
Whether there are Asian-American nerds is a more complex question. Obviously the answer is yes in many ways. Real nerds do not really care about racial differences on a personal level, and anyone familiar with nerds knows that Asians and whites and others intermix. But the difference between Asian-American “nerds” and other Asian-Americans is in many ways less extreme than with other races, so far as I grasp it.
Maybe what I’m getting at is this: maybe being a “nerd” is more or less a white thing, and African-American nerds take on the role since that is more or less what is available. (Assuming they don’t want to be an overtly “Africanist” figure like Cornel West.)
But in Africa, apart from pieces of South Africa, there are no white nerds. (Whites in other parts of Africa just are not going to be nerds.) The role is not available for the taking. Perhaps an African at the very high end of the IQ scale is going to construe his position as nothing other than an entry point into global, world culture, and will have no qualms about entering.

There are around 4 million whites and around 40 million blacks in South Africa, but I can tell you from personal experience that finding a black nerd is exceedingly rare. There are things like cosplay competitions events that are of a much MUCH smaller scale than in the USA, these gatherings tend to also include other things like board gamers, D&D and video gamer nerds. Looking around, the only blacks you will see will be the security guards and the catering staff, one can literally count the number of black nerds in these events with two or three fingers. I asked a black colleague with a reasonably high intelligence about this, he said that in black communities nerd behaviour is seen as weak and effeminate its almost akin to being homosexual, being a nerd is a just not something that would please the community.

But in Africa, apart from pieces of South Africa, there are no white nerds.

That probably has to do with the fact that the rest of Africa one can count all the whites in the few thousands.

But is the African environment cognitively “deficient” or cognitively “different”? Might not a test of cognitive capacity devised to assess performance that is adaptive in a typical African social and physical milieu reveal cognitive “deficiency” of the Western environment?

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

It's a simple matter of probability. If the IQ distribution for Gabon, posited by the likes of Lynn, is correct, the probability that it would throw up large numbers of world class scrabble players is, essentially, zero.

I would say the lowest IQ estimation for SSA are untenable. However, Wicherts et al once estimated African IQ to be much higher, in range of American Blacks (lower 80s). Taking that into account, and allowing for SD higher than 12 would allow theoretically for Gabon players (if scrabble would be national sport played pretty much by everyone, from the kids on the streets to the elders on their deathbeds).

However, the fact that average top scrabble players in Europe or America may have IQ of 140 does not mean one need IQ of 140 to be a top player; in chess, IIRC, correlation between IQ and chess ability goes down with top players. In one study (quoted by Grabner et al) expert chess players (ELO up to 2400, ie Kenny Solomon is within that range) had average 115 in IQ subscales, while mere 106 in overal general intelligence. Grabner found that the highest intelligence of top chess player was 144 and, in contrast, he found significant correlation, with “g” explaining something like one third of the variance in ELO rating. That means that not every GM chess player has to have 140 IQ. In other study however, Bilalic McLeod 2010, the correlation between IQ and skill disappeared amongst the top players (with average IQ in range of 130s) – though the size of the sample was very small.

“When an elite subsample of 23 children was tested, it turned out that intelligence was not a significant factor in chess skill, and that, if anything, it tended to correlate negatively with chess skill.”

As scrabble requires intelligence, but also a lot of memorizing, it means it may tap more on some sub-scale of general intelligence AND that’s why I think the assumption that top players HAVE to be 140 is unguaranteed (in general). After all, it were the American players which were tested, not the African ones.

With threshold 130, and Wicherts higher IQ estimation, you can get 1 in ten thousand top players even with SD 12.

One have to wonder, however: what if there are african subpopulations with IQ significantly higher than neighbouring population, similarly to Jewish Ashkenazis? That still would mean the lowest estimations of IQ in places like Gabon are way too low, but if there would be say a small population like 10% of Gabon’s population, it would effectively almost double the number of potential players.

I will repeat myself, however: with plenty of evidence pointing in one direction, and one or two (though very good) pieces of evidence pointing into the other direction, you have to be forgiving that people are not immedietely convinced.

Sorry but no. Bobby Fischer had an IQ measured at 180 and 185. The recent Norwegian world champion well above 160. These are normal ranges for IQ chess international grandmasters. There is no way someone with an IQ of 115 could be competitive at this level in chess.

I'll take a closer look at your other points and posts later, but for now you'll have to explain for me your logic in this statement, which you apparently need to be true:

However, the fact that average top scrabble players in Europe or America may have IQ of 140 does not mean one need IQ of 140 to be a top player

This is only true if there is no connection between their being "top Scrabble players" and having that IQ of 140.

If within Europe or America, a lower IQ person has a disadvantage against the 140 IQ players, can you explain to me exactly how he would not have that same disadvantage just because he happens to have migrated from Africa? (That's exactly what you're saying.) And whatever answer you give (I can't begin to imagine what that is), can you also explain why this strange African exceptionality does not seem to apply to native black Americans?

You're on the verge of suggesting that Africans need something other than intelligence to achieve what requires intelligence among other groups. I'm sure you can see the contradictions inherent in that suggestion.

I would say the lowest IQ estimation for SSA are untenable. However, Wicherts et al once estimated African IQ to be much higher, in range of American Blacks (lower 80s).

Of course the IQ estimation for SSA that HBD racists get off on is untenable. Whites with that IQ are literally drooling retards, but blacks are not?

If as you write, Wicherts at al estimate the correct African IQ to be in the low 80s, that puts Africans on par with Arabs, Persians, Indians etc. The average IQ of Syrians for example is 79 according to Lynn, thus lower than Wicherts estimate for sub Saharan Africans. Note that Syrians and their fellow Levantines the Lebanese are the whitest of the arabs.

So,
IF scrabble taps on some specific abilities A, B, C…
AND the gaps in those specific abilities A,B,C are lower between whites-blacks than in general “g”
AND if those A,B,C correlate with “g”, but differently in whites-blacks
THEN better performance in scrabble for blacks may be explainable without doubting the gaps in general “g”.

The problem with this reasoning is that visual-spatial reasoning is usually well correlated with “g” in whites, but it’s a starting point for people smarter than me, I guess, to solve this puzzle.

Very true - I'd add, having spend some time in Sub Saharan Africa that a substantially greater proportion of the population lack decent AC and time for pass-times such as scrabble. Also there is no real money or status attached to success. Also, given that they would compete in either English or French much of the population would lack the vocabulary in their second language.

I've known too many bright, highly academic West African families - across 3 generations so not the statistical outlier - to believe the simplistic SS African IQ score. I'd love to read some research about Igbos who seem over-represented in any mathematical type job they can aim for.

Maybe your thesis could be tested with another game that is not helped by book learning, such ashttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala . Are there world competitions in this game? Do Africans have an advantage?

1) Do we have firm evidence about the genetic makeup of these players from Gabon et al?

2) Even at 70 mean and 12sd, a 130 IQ is only 5 standard deviations away, which means the top 0.006% will have a 130 IQ and above, even without taking into account fat tails. That's more than 100 people in Gabon alone.

3) The author assumes that "of course all the smart people wouldn't just play board games" ... the research on IQ gaps suggests the opposite. People at the extreme edges of IQ are usually socially isolated and incomprehensible to their peers. I imagine this is only exacerbated in Africa where intelligence isn't prized like it is in the west. I would expect even more severe nerd in-grouping among intelligent Africans.

Half of the 100 would be kids, given Gabon’s demographics.

In the UK there are millions of recreational players, a few thousand serious tournament players and a handful of world class players.

But in Gabon, for some reason, every single person of sufficient IQ dedicates themselves to this game.

Hmm. I can only suggest that you familiarize yourself with the concept of Occam’s Razor.

Every mental activity is a proxy for IQ, in a sense that excelling at every mental activity requires some cognitive abilities. Of course, some mental activities are better proxies than others. However, it is unlikely that excelling at a game requiring memorizing tens of thousands of words, imagining possible strategies for the opponent and quickly finding needed words, calculating their values and mentally rotating them would not require at least minimal level of average IQ.Even with IQ threshold 100, then if Gabon would have IQ 70 and SD 12, then there would be 9.000 eligible players in Gabon. This is however unlikely that minimal IQ would be mere 100. With IQ 115, there would be 129 players eligible in Gabon (again, assuming SD 12 and IQ 70), or less than 2000 with SD=15. It is extremely unlikely that large proportion of them would go play Scrabble and it is especially unlikely that they would be defeating white players - even if there would be only 10.000 white players in whole France, then 1.500 of them would be above the required threshold.

That means that this is a legitimate argument and if you don't get it, then you should not even participate in a discussion.

Therefore, IQ=70 is IMO absolutely impossible for Gabon.

However, if we would assume IQ=85 and SD=15, then for threshold IQ=115 there would be almost 33000 potential players; correcting for age and gender, still enough players to explain why there were some able to become top players.

Chisala argument is that for white players:(1) at IQ 115 there would not be gender imbalance (that is false; it would be enough to get 4 points difference in F/M means and 3 points difference in SD to get 2/3 of players being male)

(2) there would be no dominance of Jewish players: the arguments goes, that if being good in Scrabble does not correlate with IQ above some threshold, there would be no additional gains for being high IQ, hence there should not be overrepresentation for Jews. That is false, because with say 115 IQ for Ashkenazi Jews, half of them would have minimal IQ, while only some 16% of whites, meaning 3/4 of top players would be expected to be Jewish with same ppulation size, while with 6 million Jews and 185 non-Jewish whites, some 10% of top players should be Jewish (if my math is correct).

(3) White players are found to be high on IQ, good for math etc. However the studies I read seem to indicate the players are significantly higher on specific subtests. Moreover, there are not direct IQ tests, it seems to me, and especially, no tests for African Scrabble players.

Hence, I propose that the puzzle is solved by:(1) Assuming mean IQ of at least 80 for SSA(2) Assuming that some specific abilities are good for scrabble(3) Those abilities do correlate with IQ for both whites and blacks(4) The gaps on those specific abilities is greatly diminished between blacks and whites.

I think (1)-(3) are not controversial. As for (4), there are many studies showing that indeed, the gap in "g" does not mean it is the same on every IQ subtests. This is true both for white-black gap, but also for white-east asian gap. Hence, I argue the (4) is valid hypothesis.

The fact that you use "being good at Scrabble" (or even chess) as a proxy for high IQ tells me all I need to know about your analytic ability.

If a Gabonese Scrabble champion outperforms a math professor, the problem is with the assumption that Scrabble is highly g-loaded.

Every mental activity is a proxy for IQ, in a sense that excelling at every mental activity requires some cognitive abilities. Of course, some mental activities are better proxies than others. However, it is unlikely that excelling at a game requiring memorizing tens of thousands of words, imagining possible strategies for the opponent and quickly finding needed words, calculating their values and mentally rotating them would not require at least minimal level of average IQ.
Even with IQ threshold 100, then if Gabon would have IQ 70 and SD 12, then there would be 9.000 eligible players in Gabon. This is however unlikely that minimal IQ would be mere 100. With IQ 115, there would be 129 players eligible in Gabon (again, assuming SD 12 and IQ 70), or less than 2000 with SD=15. It is extremely unlikely that large proportion of them would go play Scrabble and it is especially unlikely that they would be defeating white players – even if there would be only 10.000 white players in whole France, then 1.500 of them would be above the required threshold.

That means that this is a legitimate argument and if you don’t get it, then you should not even participate in a discussion.

Therefore, IQ=70 is IMO absolutely impossible for Gabon.

However, if we would assume IQ=85 and SD=15, then for threshold IQ=115 there would be almost 33000 potential players; correcting for age and gender, still enough players to explain why there were some able to become top players.

Chisala argument is that for white players:
(1) at IQ 115 there would not be gender imbalance (that is false; it would be enough to get 4 points difference in F/M means and 3 points difference in SD to get 2/3 of players being male)

(2) there would be no dominance of Jewish players: the arguments goes, that if being good in Scrabble does not correlate with IQ above some threshold, there would be no additional gains for being high IQ, hence there should not be overrepresentation for Jews. That is false, because with say 115 IQ for Ashkenazi Jews, half of them would have minimal IQ, while only some 16% of whites, meaning 3/4 of top players would be expected to be Jewish with same ppulation size, while with 6 million Jews and 185 non-Jewish whites, some 10% of top players should be Jewish (if my math is correct).

(3) White players are found to be high on IQ, good for math etc. However the studies I read seem to indicate the players are significantly higher on specific subtests. Moreover, there are not direct IQ tests, it seems to me, and especially, no tests for African Scrabble players.

Hence, I propose that the puzzle is solved by:
(1) Assuming mean IQ of at least 80 for SSA
(2) Assuming that some specific abilities are good for scrabble
(3) Those abilities do correlate with IQ for both whites and blacks
(4) The gaps on those specific abilities is greatly diminished between blacks and whites.

I think (1)-(3) are not controversial. As for (4), there are many studies showing that indeed, the gap in “g” does not mean it is the same on every IQ subtests. This is true both for white-black gap, but also for white-east asian gap. Hence, I argue the (4) is valid hypothesis.

Forgot about one Chisala's argument: why there are not a lot of Jewish women in top players. Indeed, we would expect there to be a lot of Jewish women and I have no explanation for this one.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

Every mental activity is a proxy for IQ, in a sense that excelling at every mental activity requires some cognitive abilities. Of course, some mental activities are better proxies than others. However, it is unlikely that excelling at a game requiring memorizing tens of thousands of words, imagining possible strategies for the opponent and quickly finding needed words, calculating their values and mentally rotating them would not require at least minimal level of average IQ.Even with IQ threshold 100, then if Gabon would have IQ 70 and SD 12, then there would be 9.000 eligible players in Gabon. This is however unlikely that minimal IQ would be mere 100. With IQ 115, there would be 129 players eligible in Gabon (again, assuming SD 12 and IQ 70), or less than 2000 with SD=15. It is extremely unlikely that large proportion of them would go play Scrabble and it is especially unlikely that they would be defeating white players - even if there would be only 10.000 white players in whole France, then 1.500 of them would be above the required threshold.

That means that this is a legitimate argument and if you don't get it, then you should not even participate in a discussion.

Therefore, IQ=70 is IMO absolutely impossible for Gabon.

However, if we would assume IQ=85 and SD=15, then for threshold IQ=115 there would be almost 33000 potential players; correcting for age and gender, still enough players to explain why there were some able to become top players.

Chisala argument is that for white players:(1) at IQ 115 there would not be gender imbalance (that is false; it would be enough to get 4 points difference in F/M means and 3 points difference in SD to get 2/3 of players being male)

(2) there would be no dominance of Jewish players: the arguments goes, that if being good in Scrabble does not correlate with IQ above some threshold, there would be no additional gains for being high IQ, hence there should not be overrepresentation for Jews. That is false, because with say 115 IQ for Ashkenazi Jews, half of them would have minimal IQ, while only some 16% of whites, meaning 3/4 of top players would be expected to be Jewish with same ppulation size, while with 6 million Jews and 185 non-Jewish whites, some 10% of top players should be Jewish (if my math is correct).

(3) White players are found to be high on IQ, good for math etc. However the studies I read seem to indicate the players are significantly higher on specific subtests. Moreover, there are not direct IQ tests, it seems to me, and especially, no tests for African Scrabble players.

Hence, I propose that the puzzle is solved by:(1) Assuming mean IQ of at least 80 for SSA(2) Assuming that some specific abilities are good for scrabble(3) Those abilities do correlate with IQ for both whites and blacks(4) The gaps on those specific abilities is greatly diminished between blacks and whites.

I think (1)-(3) are not controversial. As for (4), there are many studies showing that indeed, the gap in "g" does not mean it is the same on every IQ subtests. This is true both for white-black gap, but also for white-east asian gap. Hence, I argue the (4) is valid hypothesis.

Forgot about one Chisala’s argument: why there are not a lot of Jewish women in top players. Indeed, we would expect there to be a lot of Jewish women and I have no explanation for this one.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

I get the argument. It's a dumb argument. For many reasons, not the least of which is that its premise--viz., that performance at Scrabble is a more reliable indicator of the mean IQ of a population, than tests which directly measure IQ in members of that population--is so obviously and heinously flawed as to hardly need any external refutation.

Beyond that, Scrabble is a dumb game mostly enjoyed by midwits who like to fancy themselves much smarter than they actually are. The notion that performance at Scrabble should scale linearly with IQ is preposterous, and needs to be demonstrated. Chisala simply assumes facts not in evidence, wildly extrapolating from garbage social "science" papers (Toma et al. 2014, the one she referenced about the IQ of "elite" Scrabble players, used a grand total of n = 26 Scrabble players). This amounts to assuming her conclusion.

That national rates of Scrabble-champion production is being promoted as reliable evidence of national mean IQ, by the same people who decry standard g-loaded IQ tests as "culturally biased," practically beggars belief. Or rather it would, if the limits of these people's analytical ability had not already been so thoroughly exposed.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

I think szopen's statement is an excellent point and goes a long way to explaining the sex differences at high levels. Especially given that in my experience women are if anything overrepresented in casual Scrabble play (especially if you compare to something like chess!) and are quite competitive at that level (which I tend to attribute to verbal facility). One question that goes along with that observation is how different is casual from competitive Scrabble? I think a fair bit (e.g. extensive focused memorization of key word lists, possibly verbal vs. spatial importance?), and if the differences favor males in competitive Scrabble that would be another partial explanation.

This need for practice ties in with one of Chanda's points:

There should still (statistically) be no single person from African countries like Gabon. And yet they exist, constantly outperforming math professors and computer scientists from the developed world.

Competing at the top levels in Scrabble (I believe) requires extensive practice time over years. There is a comparative advantage argument here that people who have better things to do with their time (or stated more charitably, time consuming primary/other activities) are less likely to excel at Scrabble even given comparable potential.

The obvious follow on question is: can we support this hypothesis? I don't think we have data to do so, but let me sketch some thoughts.

1. Tendency of potential elite Scrabble players to have other things to do professionally.
2. Tendency of potential elite Scrabble players to choose Scrabble as their preferred recreation.

Question 1. could be answered empirically somewhat. How do the professional backgrounds and practice regimens of elite non/African Scrabble players compare?

Question 2. can also be answered empirically. How do the Scrabble/chess/etc. pipelines compare in the different countries?

Back to comparative advantage, I think it would help to look at the reasons people choose to play elite Scrabble vs. other activities. One last partial explanation would be if the stereotypical extemporaneous verbal facility of blacks translates to Scrabble providing both increased ability and incentive to choose this activity.

Overall I like thinking about this problem as a series of filters acting on the Scrabble ability (with IQ only being a partial proxy, this becomes important if the other ability probability distributions are less tilted against, or even favor, Africans) probability distribution. Here's a proposal for a Scrabble player profile with filters (of course the "thresholds" are soft).

Any thoughts on the validity/utility of this train of thought? How about the impact of the other requirements on the representation of African players at the elite levels of Scrabble?

This comment does not have much rigor or any data, but hopefully it offers some food for thought. I think there are testable hypotheses embedded here (e.g. population distributions in Scrabble "pipeline", different game prevalence in different cultures) if we only had data.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

Is there even such a thing as an "African nerd"?
There clearly are African-American nerds (and i have known a few, but only a few). And they are pretty much nerds in the same way as white American nerds.
Whether there are Asian-American nerds is a more complex question. Obviously the answer is yes in many ways. Real nerds do not really care about racial differences on a personal level, and anyone familiar with nerds knows that Asians and whites and others intermix. But the difference between Asian-American "nerds" and other Asian-Americans is in many ways less extreme than with other races, so far as I grasp it.
Maybe what I'm getting at is this: maybe being a "nerd" is more or less a white thing, and African-American nerds take on the role since that is more or less what is available. (Assuming they don't want to be an overtly "Africanist" figure like Cornel West.)
But in Africa, apart from pieces of South Africa, there are no white nerds. (Whites in other parts of Africa just are not going to be nerds.) The role is not available for the taking. Perhaps an African at the very high end of the IQ scale is going to construe his position as nothing other than an entry point into global, world culture, and will have no qualms about entering.

There are around 4 million whites and around 40 million blacks in South Africa, but I can tell you from personal experience that finding a black nerd is exceedingly rare. There are things like cosplay competitions events that are of a much MUCH smaller scale than in the USA, these gatherings tend to also include other things like board gamers, D&D and video gamer nerds. Looking around, the only blacks you will see will be the security guards and the catering staff, one can literally count the number of black nerds in these events with two or three fingers. I asked a black colleague with a reasonably high intelligence about this, he said that in black communities nerd behaviour is seen as weak and effeminate its almost akin to being homosexual, being a nerd is a just not something that would please the community.

But in Africa, apart from pieces of South Africa, there are no white nerds.

That probably has to do with the fact that the rest of Africa one can count all the whites in the few thousands.

I think there are several lines of argument presented in this article that are worth thinking about in greater detail. I agree with Chanda Chisala that the very low mean IQ estimate for many countries in Africa would not permit so many people with outsized intellectual abilities. I also agree that environmental conditions, training, hard work, and opportunity can improve the cognitive performance of anyone who is dedicated to trying to improve. The improvement, however, is likely limited by the individual’s underlying innate ability to take advantage of the opportunity.

But even if African individuals can perform at the highest levels in cognitively demanding subjects, something that I believe is true, it does not mean that the biological races are equal in their intellectual abilities on an average basis. There seems to be overwhelming scientific evidence for those differences, and I think it is dishonest to pretend that such differences are only explained by cultural forces.

The way out of this mess. Treat individuals as individuals. If you are smart enough to be a world scrabble champion more power to you, regardless of your race. But cut out affirmative action of any kind. It insults black people of genuine learning and accomplishment whose achievements will always be called into question under a system of preferential hiring and admissions.

Is there even such a thing as an "African nerd"?
There clearly are African-American nerds (and i have known a few, but only a few). And they are pretty much nerds in the same way as white American nerds.
Whether there are Asian-American nerds is a more complex question. Obviously the answer is yes in many ways. Real nerds do not really care about racial differences on a personal level, and anyone familiar with nerds knows that Asians and whites and others intermix. But the difference between Asian-American "nerds" and other Asian-Americans is in many ways less extreme than with other races, so far as I grasp it.
Maybe what I'm getting at is this: maybe being a "nerd" is more or less a white thing, and African-American nerds take on the role since that is more or less what is available. (Assuming they don't want to be an overtly "Africanist" figure like Cornel West.)
But in Africa, apart from pieces of South Africa, there are no white nerds. (Whites in other parts of Africa just are not going to be nerds.) The role is not available for the taking. Perhaps an African at the very high end of the IQ scale is going to construe his position as nothing other than an entry point into global, world culture, and will have no qualms about entering.

Nerds is the east asian stereotype as well thug-life is the black stereotype.

I don’t know what is the % of blacks who are ”thuggish” nor east asians who are ”nerdisch”, but for both appears to be respectively high if compared with whites.

There are more white thug-life than east asian thug-life and there are more nerd east asian than white east asian. Maybe when we have a combination of both, very interesting individuals can be found.

Maybe your thesis could be tested with another game that is not helped by book learning, such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala . Are there world competitions in this game? Do Africans have an advantage?

Might excellence at Scrabble be more reflective of a particular aspect of intelligence not necessarily directly correlated with IQ? Similar perhaps to “musical talent?”

Here we go, the IQists last resort in the face of overwhelming refutation of their beloved theory. Any talent that does not correlate with IQ can't be a manifestation of intelligence: it's gotta be a savant ability, or something a bit weird like Mozart's musical gift, or Richard Feynman's (IQ 124) Nobel Prize winning work in quantum electrodynamics, or these darned Africans whipping every American's arse, black or white, at Scrabble.

But you'd think, wouldn't you, that however culturally weird these Africans are, there'd be a few of those much more intelligent Americans who'd have the same fixation for Scrabble playing as the Africans and would show the Africans whose boss.

Everyone can write a beautiful poetry* Or just a tiny traction of the population who have: intrinsic motivation enough to engage in, personality traits that increase it and cognitive style [very good on metaphorical thinking*] to produce it*

The same for chess and scrabble games*

The top 1% of chess and scrabble gamers are demographically bigger or the otherwise*

I would say the lowest IQ estimation for SSA are untenable. However, Wicherts et al once estimated African IQ to be much higher, in range of American Blacks (lower 80s). Taking that into account, and allowing for SD higher than 12 would allow theoretically for Gabon players (if scrabble would be national sport played pretty much by everyone, from the kids on the streets to the elders on their deathbeds).

However, the fact that average top scrabble players in Europe or America may have IQ of 140 does not mean one need IQ of 140 to be a top player; in chess, IIRC, correlation between IQ and chess ability goes down with top players. In one study (quoted by Grabner et al) expert chess players (ELO up to 2400, ie Kenny Solomon is within that range) had average 115 in IQ subscales, while mere 106 in overal general intelligence. Grabner found that the highest intelligence of top chess player was 144 and, in contrast, he found significant correlation, with "g" explaining something like one third of the variance in ELO rating. That means that not every GM chess player has to have 140 IQ. In other study however, Bilalic McLeod 2010, the correlation between IQ and skill disappeared amongst the top players (with average IQ in range of 130s) - though the size of the sample was very small.

"When an elite subsample of 23 children was tested, it turned out that intelligence was not a significant factor in chess skill, and that, if anything, it tended to correlate negatively with chess skill."

As scrabble requires intelligence, but also a lot of memorizing, it means it may tap more on some sub-scale of general intelligence AND that's why I think the assumption that top players HAVE to be 140 is unguaranteed (in general). After all, it were the American players which were tested, not the African ones.

With threshold 130, and Wicherts higher IQ estimation, you can get 1 in ten thousand top players even with SD 12.

One have to wonder, however: what if there are african subpopulations with IQ significantly higher than neighbouring population, similarly to Jewish Ashkenazis? That still would mean the lowest estimations of IQ in places like Gabon are way too low, but if there would be say a small population like 10% of Gabon's population, it would effectively almost double the number of potential players.

I will repeat myself, however: with plenty of evidence pointing in one direction, and one or two (though very good) pieces of evidence pointing into the other direction, you have to be forgiving that people are not immedietely convinced.

Sorry but no. Bobby Fischer had an IQ measured at 180 and 185. The recent Norwegian world champion well above 160. These are normal ranges for IQ chess international grandmasters. There is no way someone with an IQ of 115 could be competitive at this level in chess.

The fact that some grandmasters may have high IQ does not mean all have. In fact, you can easily google the papers which tried to measure the IQs of the grandmasters and the consensus seems to be that while average grandmaster's IQ is higher than the average, it's not that high overall.

I argued that Africans should not be able to come anywhere near dominating the games of Scrabble (both English and French) or professional checkers, as they apparently do, if their real biological intelligence was anywhere near as low as their nominal IQ scores might indicate.

So we have to read your

little

posts to you summarize straightly your delirium in this few words, thank you sir!1

their real biological intelligence was anywhere near as low as their nominal IQ scores

Although these board games evidently require very high intelligence at the top competitive world championship level (not necessarily at the home level with your dad), and attract extremely nerdy math types, they have the specific advantage of not being too affected by the well-known learning/training resource gaps that exist between rich and poor populations.

Intelligence, define it better. And in the end, sociological conjectures.

The quantitative argument here is that if there is a large average cognitive gap in potential chess ability between blacks and whites, this gap will be most conspicuous at the highest levels of performance. You have the opposite result in South African chess, contrary to what prominent racial hypothesizers like Gregory Cochran expect.

Or that chess/scrabble ability is less generalizable for people who have higher cognitive potential and more specific for those who have: strong intrinsic motivation, higher cognitive skills, partial self-knowledge, at least, to learn with their own mistakes specifically related with this game/aka talent AND possibly, specific cognitive style that make it easier to be played.

You need, higher potential, motivation to work hard and constantly, at least partial cognitive self-knowledge to improve your game strategies and possibly a specific cognitive style, that make it easier for you to play.

It’s just like soccer players. We have the goalkeeper, the defender, the soccer forward, etc…

We have the strategy skills, chess game is just like the ”IQ” for this specific ability, of course, no real-world context, just a estimative. Specific ability [chess] of more broad[able] ability [strategy skills]. (in the real world, any succesful strategy need some very important general knowledge/aka, context].

You have exceptions and you think it represent the rule.

Even i believe that because ”blacks” [specially some groups] tend to be more adhd-like, just like Simone Biles, so some them may have ”hyper-focus” potential.

Of course, because exceptions tend to be more colorful than the rule, we tend to over-estimate them specially when the group is ”yours’.

Forgot about one Chisala's argument: why there are not a lot of Jewish women in top players. Indeed, we would expect there to be a lot of Jewish women and I have no explanation for this one.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

I get the argument. It’s a dumb argument. For many reasons, not the least of which is that its premise–viz., that performance at Scrabble is a more reliable indicator of the mean IQ of a population, than tests which directly measure IQ in members of that population–is so obviously and heinously flawed as to hardly need any external refutation.

Beyond that, Scrabble is a dumb game mostly enjoyed by midwits who like to fancy themselves much smarter than they actually are. The notion that performance at Scrabble should scale linearly with IQ is preposterous, and needs to be demonstrated. Chisala simply assumes facts not in evidence, wildly extrapolating from garbage social “science” papers (Toma et al. 2014, the one she referenced about the IQ of “elite” Scrabble players, used a grand total of n = 26 Scrabble players). This amounts to assuming her conclusion.

That national rates of Scrabble-champion production is being promoted as reliable evidence of national mean IQ, by the same people who decry standard g-loaded IQ tests as “culturally biased,” practically beggars belief. Or rather it would, if the limits of these people’s analytical ability had not already been so thoroughly exposed.

The notion that performance at Scrabble should scale linearly with IQ is preposterous

Agreed, but it does not have to scale linearly. In fact I bet the relation is not linear, but rather polynomial - i.e. that IQ may matter a lot initially, but in higher numbers it might matter a lot less. All what is needed that there is some relation, and I am sure there must be some relation - because my firm belief is that all mental activities are correlated, however weakly, with IQ. I do not agree that top masters have IQ 140, as should be clear from my earlier comments. However, I do think there should be some minimal IQ required to become a scrabble top master, and even if that minimal IQ would be as low as 100, there still would be only few people in Gabon able to qualify - the number of people (correcting for age and gender) eligible in Gabon would be comparable to number of registered French players!

Therefore, I argue NOT that Gabon average IQ is the same as European. But I think that Chisala's puzzle MUST mean Gabon's IQ can not be 70 or 64.

Blogging about a highly distinguished South African physicist of Jewish descent, Neil Turok, who believes that black Africans could academically perform as well as once-poor Ashkenazi Jews historically did when they became exposed to high quality education, Cochran calls him smart but “crazy.” Cochran then appeals to Turok’s common sense by asking him to look at his own personal experience with black South Africans on different brainy contests:

And Russians excel at chess and produce a disproportionate number of grandmasters simply because they practice chess more, given its ubiquitousness in their culture.

This article is we wuz kangz-tier nonsense.

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it.

It gets better. Reaction Times are correlated with "G". It is divided into two parts: one, real reaction time, correlated with "g" (from noticing signal to release button) and muscular time, not correlated with "g" (from releasing one button to push another button). So, in the same task, black do well on purely physical measure, not correlated with "g", while poorly on the part of the task correlated with "g". Amazing, innit? Surely it is because in the same task, blacks do well on physical part because it matters to them, while not on psychological task because it does not matter to them. Wow!

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

An IQ test can be normed to any population. I believe an effort is made to be consistent with the norms used when making between country comparisons. There are issues with test language, but those don't apply for non-verbal tests (e.g. Raven's [Advanced] Progressive Matrices).

There is potentially an issue of different relative abilities (e.g. verbal, math, spatial) changing the calculated composition of "g" (hence IQ scoring), but I haven't seen that explored in a research paper.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

I assume you are familiar with the phrase "False Equivalence"?

The NBA is a good example because it integrated relatively early: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
Your statement is literally wrong (first black in the NBA in 1950), but that does not invalidate your overall point here. I do think you can make a strong argument that cultural and other environmental changes are responsible for the change in proportion of blacks in the NBA from 1950-2017. That link has a nice plot of racial composition of the NBA from 1990-2013. We can see that the B/W composition has not changed much over that time. What we see is black representation changing earlier as the environmental and cultural negatives were eliminated allowing apparent natural superiority (e.g. wingspan, athletic explosiveness, improvisational skill ?) to show as overrepresentation. This transition was largely complete by 1990 which is also what we see with the test score gap.

The key point against your position is that despite open (preferred in admissions now even) access to education in the US the ability gap has not closed completely and the narrowing has now plateaued. I think the argument that the gap for blacks in the US now is largely representative of underlying ability is difficult to refute. There is likely room to reduce the African gap by environmental changes, but it is unclear what proportion of the difference would change.

WHY HAS BLACK-WHITE SKILL CONVERGENCE STOPPED? public.econ.duke.edu/~hf14/teaching/povertydisc/readings/neal2006.pdf
I thought Table 1 showing the educational gap over the last century was especially interesting.

For those interested in historical data for the B/W test score gap this has a comprehensive bibliography: http://humanvarieties.org/2013/01/15/100-years-of-testing-negro-intelligence/

And as for your "whites" comment, it's worth considering what someone makes of the relative Asian and Jewish IQ scores before drawing conclusions.

If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know.

Please do so.

Regarding your final paragraph. Achievement is a result of ability accompanied by effort (plus some luck ; ). Both matter. Attempting to attribute all success to effort is as mistaken as the reverse (well, perhaps more mistaken given the measured heritability of IQ, it's not just about prepping).

With regard to reaction times, Jensen found that, when the task was completely unrelated to g, black and white times converged, but as the g-loading of the task was increased, the black-white difference became more and more pronounced.

Note also a backwards digits test: when asked to recite a series of digits in reverse order, blacks cannot recite as long a series as whites (or East Asians), on average.

"60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time."

Is this the best you can do? Is it just a coincidence that blacks, on average, have the morphology and muscle fiber typing that, at the elite level, would have them excel at the game?

Today the NBA is 80 percent black. Today the NFL is 60 percent black. Today the MLB is 8 percent black and with 'Hispanic' blacks (islanders), they make up about 34 percent of the MLB and dominate there too. So look at what happens when there is an 'even' playing field in terms of nutrition and opportunities to excel in these sports.

Agree. Thank you for freeing me from spending hours formulating the same general arguments ... and doing a better job at it.

I'm surprised that Chanda Chisala does not follow up his Scrabble conclusions with the claims that the core of Western knowledge was appropriated from Black Africa in the time of the Pharaohs ... or, that Western Civilization reached its technical and organizational successes on the backs of Black slaves.

Chanda appears to have a conclusion in search of a justification ... and he is definitely having trouble finding one.

And Russians excel at chess and produce a disproportionate number of grandmasters simply because they practice chess more, given its ubiquitousness in their culture.

This article is we wuz kangz-tier nonsense.

“This article is we wuz kangz-tier nonsense.”

You simply haven’t understood the question Chisala is posing.

It’s a simple matter of probability. If the IQ distribution for Gabon, posited by the likes of Lynn, is correct, the probability that it would throw up large numbers of world class scrabble players is, essentially, zero.

Every mental activity is a proxy for IQ, in a sense that excelling at every mental activity requires some cognitive abilities. Of course, some mental activities are better proxies than others. However, it is unlikely that excelling at a game requiring memorizing tens of thousands of words, imagining possible strategies for the opponent and quickly finding needed words, calculating their values and mentally rotating them would not require at least minimal level of average IQ.Even with IQ threshold 100, then if Gabon would have IQ 70 and SD 12, then there would be 9.000 eligible players in Gabon. This is however unlikely that minimal IQ would be mere 100. With IQ 115, there would be 129 players eligible in Gabon (again, assuming SD 12 and IQ 70), or less than 2000 with SD=15. It is extremely unlikely that large proportion of them would go play Scrabble and it is especially unlikely that they would be defeating white players - even if there would be only 10.000 white players in whole France, then 1.500 of them would be above the required threshold.

That means that this is a legitimate argument and if you don't get it, then you should not even participate in a discussion.

Therefore, IQ=70 is IMO absolutely impossible for Gabon.

However, if we would assume IQ=85 and SD=15, then for threshold IQ=115 there would be almost 33000 potential players; correcting for age and gender, still enough players to explain why there were some able to become top players.

Chisala argument is that for white players:(1) at IQ 115 there would not be gender imbalance (that is false; it would be enough to get 4 points difference in F/M means and 3 points difference in SD to get 2/3 of players being male)

(2) there would be no dominance of Jewish players: the arguments goes, that if being good in Scrabble does not correlate with IQ above some threshold, there would be no additional gains for being high IQ, hence there should not be overrepresentation for Jews. That is false, because with say 115 IQ for Ashkenazi Jews, half of them would have minimal IQ, while only some 16% of whites, meaning 3/4 of top players would be expected to be Jewish with same ppulation size, while with 6 million Jews and 185 non-Jewish whites, some 10% of top players should be Jewish (if my math is correct).

(3) White players are found to be high on IQ, good for math etc. However the studies I read seem to indicate the players are significantly higher on specific subtests. Moreover, there are not direct IQ tests, it seems to me, and especially, no tests for African Scrabble players.

Hence, I propose that the puzzle is solved by:(1) Assuming mean IQ of at least 80 for SSA(2) Assuming that some specific abilities are good for scrabble(3) Those abilities do correlate with IQ for both whites and blacks(4) The gaps on those specific abilities is greatly diminished between blacks and whites.

I think (1)-(3) are not controversial. As for (4), there are many studies showing that indeed, the gap in "g" does not mean it is the same on every IQ subtests. This is true both for white-black gap, but also for white-east asian gap. Hence, I argue the (4) is valid hypothesis.

“Assuming mean IQ of at least 80″

That would be pretty controversial here.

If the mean IQ is 80, than the underlying “genetic” potential IQ (with better nutrition, reduced disease load) might easily be in the mid ’90s – ie South Italian levels.

If the mean IQ is 80, than the underlying “genetic” potential IQ (with better nutrition, reduced disease load) might easily be in the mid ’90s – ie South Italian levels.

This is the interesting (and important) question. I think it's difficult to justify a mid-90s figure. The US black results provide a credible estimate of the max IMHO. However, I do believe that African elite intellects were underrepresented in slaves who survived. In combination with an elite subpopulation argument (e.g. Igbos) it is possible the African genetic mean is higher than seen in US blacks. I don't have a sense of the relative sizes of possible elite black subpopulations in the US and Africa.

The reason I think much of the explanation lies in elite subpopulations is how important different means become in the proportion represented in the far right tail levels. Does anyone have IQ data for individual African tribes?

Forgot about one Chisala's argument: why there are not a lot of Jewish women in top players. Indeed, we would expect there to be a lot of Jewish women and I have no explanation for this one.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

It is to expected from people with a lot of redundant time wasted on “silly” games

Sorry but no. Bobby Fischer had an IQ measured at 180 and 185. The recent Norwegian world champion well above 160. These are normal ranges for IQ chess international grandmasters. There is no way someone with an IQ of 115 could be competitive at this level in chess.

The fact that some grandmasters may have high IQ does not mean all have. In fact, you can easily google the papers which tried to measure the IQs of the grandmasters and the consensus seems to be that while average grandmaster’s IQ is higher than the average, it’s not that high overall.

Supposedly Kasparov's IQ was measured at around 135, which is decent, but hardly genius level. In fact, Fischer disparaged Kasparov once by referring to him as an idiot savant, while claiming that he himself was a universal genius. :)

I get the argument. It's a dumb argument. For many reasons, not the least of which is that its premise--viz., that performance at Scrabble is a more reliable indicator of the mean IQ of a population, than tests which directly measure IQ in members of that population--is so obviously and heinously flawed as to hardly need any external refutation.

Beyond that, Scrabble is a dumb game mostly enjoyed by midwits who like to fancy themselves much smarter than they actually are. The notion that performance at Scrabble should scale linearly with IQ is preposterous, and needs to be demonstrated. Chisala simply assumes facts not in evidence, wildly extrapolating from garbage social "science" papers (Toma et al. 2014, the one she referenced about the IQ of "elite" Scrabble players, used a grand total of n = 26 Scrabble players). This amounts to assuming her conclusion.

That national rates of Scrabble-champion production is being promoted as reliable evidence of national mean IQ, by the same people who decry standard g-loaded IQ tests as "culturally biased," practically beggars belief. Or rather it would, if the limits of these people's analytical ability had not already been so thoroughly exposed.

The notion that performance at Scrabble should scale linearly with IQ is preposterous

Agreed, but it does not have to scale linearly. In fact I bet the relation is not linear, but rather polynomial – i.e. that IQ may matter a lot initially, but in higher numbers it might matter a lot less. All what is needed that there is some relation, and I am sure there must be some relation – because my firm belief is that all mental activities are correlated, however weakly, with IQ. I do not agree that top masters have IQ 140, as should be clear from my earlier comments. However, I do think there should be some minimal IQ required to become a scrabble top master, and even if that minimal IQ would be as low as 100, there still would be only few people in Gabon able to qualify – the number of people (correcting for age and gender) eligible in Gabon would be comparable to number of registered French players!

Therefore, I argue NOT that Gabon average IQ is the same as European. But I think that Chisala’s puzzle MUST mean Gabon’s IQ can not be 70 or 64.

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it.

It gets better. Reaction Times are correlated with “G”. It is divided into two parts: one, real reaction time, correlated with “g” (from noticing signal to release button) and muscular time, not correlated with “g” (from releasing one button to push another button). So, in the same task, black do well on purely physical measure, not correlated with “g”, while poorly on the part of the task correlated with “g”. Amazing, innit? Surely it is because in the same task, blacks do well on physical part because it matters to them, while not on psychological task because it does not matter to them. Wow!

Do you know of any data looking at both IQ and reaction time across races? I think we could learn much about the genetic structure of g if blacks have lower average g but similar average reaction time. Correlating that with racial frequency differences/similarities in IQ related SNPs would give some insight into non/reaction time related genetic aspects of g.

Take a look at the table just below that. The results are consistent with a gap, but smaller than 100 compared to 70-80. I don't think Chanda is postulating dominance--rather a smaller (nonexistent?) IQ gap than commonly quoted for African countries.

Even with a relatively small gap I would not expect representation at the very top. Even seeing one champion is a strong argument IMHO.

What I find most surprising is how many New Zealanders, Canadians, and Thais there are in the top two given their relatively low overall totals.

It would be interesting to take that table of national representation, add IQ means and SDs, add populations, add primary languages (e.g. see underrepresentation of France), and then do some numerical analysis to see how that compares to the relatively informal (non-quantitative in detail) arguments Chanda presents.

I think there are several lines of argument presented in this article that are worth thinking about in greater detail. I agree with Chanda Chisala that the very low mean IQ estimate for many countries in Africa would not permit so many people with outsized intellectual abilities. I also agree that environmental conditions, training, hard work, and opportunity can improve the cognitive performance of anyone who is dedicated to trying to improve. The improvement, however, is likely limited by the individual's underlying innate ability to take advantage of the opportunity.

But even if African individuals can perform at the highest levels in cognitively demanding subjects, something that I believe is true, it does not mean that the biological races are equal in their intellectual abilities on an average basis. There seems to be overwhelming scientific evidence for those differences, and I think it is dishonest to pretend that such differences are only explained by cultural forces.

The way out of this mess. Treat individuals as individuals. If you are smart enough to be a world scrabble champion more power to you, regardless of your race. But cut out affirmative action of any kind. It insults black people of genuine learning and accomplishment whose achievements will always be called into question under a system of preferential hiring and admissions.

I agree with Chanda Chisala that the very low mean IQ estimate for many countries in Africa would not permit so many people with outsized intellectual abilities.

”We” are talking about general avgs of populations versus exceptions, even in countries with higher IQ chess master players, even regular chess players are a minority.

The fact that some grandmasters may have high IQ does not mean all have. In fact, you can easily google the papers which tried to measure the IQs of the grandmasters and the consensus seems to be that while average grandmaster's IQ is higher than the average, it's not that high overall.

Supposedly Kasparov’s IQ was measured at around 135, which is decent, but hardly genius level. In fact, Fischer disparaged Kasparov once by referring to him as an idiot savant, while claiming that he himself was a universal genius.

IQ tests are doubtlessly important in numerous fields, but IQ fundamentalists are simply- boring. For instance, one thing IQ-obsessives generally do not consider is historicity, which cannot be measured. Take any field of human intellectual achievement, there are asymmetries than cannot be explained: why an incomparable explosion of abstract thinking in German-speaking lands from, say, 1770-1830 (Hamann, Herder, Euler, Kant, Baader, Schelling, Hegel, …); why are mathematicians from France & German-speaking lands so superior to those of England, Italy or any other country in the world, in this period (Laplace, Lagrange (from Italy), Poisson, Fourier, Cauchy, Euler, Gauss, Bernoullis, ..); why did Industrial revolution, first phase, happen in England & Scotland, and why has evolutionary biology produced so many great scientists in England, and so few in France and Germany; why are Jews so overrepresented in mathematics & physics in past 100 years, while their contribution from 1850. to 1900. had not been spectacular at all, with only a few names I can think of (Jacobi, Sylvester, Herz) ?

Human creativity is not reducible to IQ & it has too many variables we don’t know about. Chess, scrabble … nice, but I don’t see it matters in life.

That's the case with all fundamentalists. Fundamentalism reveals psychological needs of its adherents. It is like honey for bees or extremist for flies.

These are good points about what you call asymmetry. One may wonder why and with what consequences British philosophers are "empiricists", German are "idealists" and French "rationalists"?

Prior to emancipation of Jews during Napoleonic times, Jews practically had zero contribution to what we understand as Western civilization: no Jewish science, mathematics, art, architecture, literature.

Anyhow, while these might have once been factors, they have ceased to be of any import. There are huge openings databases on sites like Chess Tempo. The information content there is probably an order of magnitude larger than in the entirety of the Soviet chess literature. You can play online, or download a free chess engine like Stockfish that is about 2 S.D. better than the top grandmaster. Virtually all of the classic literature on chess is floating around in PDF format. Lots of the software is free, and much of what isn’t, can be pirated (which of course can be done completely without risk in Africa).

And before you make the obvious rejoinder, the Africans do now have Internet access – Nigeria, S. Africa, and Kenya are at 50%, even Ethiopia is at above 10%.

At least Chanda seems to have stopped using “the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces” to explain African underperformance. That is progress.

Anatoly, but does that mean you believe Gabon's average IQ to be below 70?

I'd say that no matter how many tournaments are there, Gabon has too small a population to produce enough people who could become top players with IQ below 70 and SD12, given that to become a top player some minimal IQ would be required.

In Classique, Nigel Richards surely is very intelligent guy, winning english scrabble and once French scrabble. Yet in 2016 he was 4th, one Gabonian and two guys from Cote d'Ivoire above him.
You can see that there are SOME French players in Classique tournaments.

So if Gabon would have IQ64 nd SD12, then even with minimal IQ threshold of 100 there would be 2000 people eligible for even playing. I guess no matter how unpopular classique scrabble is in France, there should be at least 2000 players in this nation? For IQ70 and SD15, and minimal IQ 100 there would be 32000 people in Gabon eligible; but do anyoe expects that everyone in Gabon who is intelligent enough, is playing Scrabble? I mean, how popular scrabble can be, do you think that attracting say 5% of eligible people to play professionally (which require training hours every day) is realistic?

In short, I think the scrabble puzzle pretty much cannot be solved without assuming average IQ for Gabon as significantly higher than

At least Chanda seems to have stopped using “the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces” to explain African performance. That is progress.

This is just silly and dishonest. You keep omitting the word just before that sentence:"... IGNORING the difficulty..." . The point that I said can be "ignored" is the one you keep presenting as "Chanda's theory" for explaining African chess performance. It seems you are launching your Mother of All Bombs on an easy straw man because you have failed to answer the harder questions. including the specific questions that I posed to you, based on your claim that Scrabble is a children's game in America, etc.

I said the point can be "ignored" precisely because it is based only on my own experience, which would make it a weak argument if I actually presented it as "my theory." I actually know that many children in at least the parts of Africa I've been exposed to, loved the game of chess when they learnt it, but they would wait in a line of twenty kids or so just to play with the one chess set that was typically available among such a group in their community. While waiting their turn to play on the one chess set, they would play checkers using bottle tops - with one side turned upside down. Now, you can of course have a different, more sophisticated genetic explanation for why more chess sets were not available among such kids. It intuitively seemed to me that the difficulty of crafting the chess pieces, compared to turning bottle tops upside down, was not a terribly implausible guess.

As for your claim that Fanhar gave the best rebuttal on this subject, I don't even know what to say to that.

Fanhar gave points that were simply mistaken.

1. He claimed that I gave wrong numbers of players from Nigeria, etc (because I want to win the argument by just lying!). It turns out he did not pay attention to the fact -- stated explicitly in my article -- that these numbers frequently change, just like any rating system of any game. One thing that could easily alter the numbers significantly is if your country's players fail to attend some major international tournaments. Etc. I therefore corrected the link to the archived ratings from when I was writing the article, which shows the precise numbers of Nigerians etc that I gave in my article. Which means the problem of explaining those numbers *at any point in history* still remains.

2. He suggested that Africans could not do well in the "Elite" section of French World championships (or something like that), which he supposed was cognitively harder, which is why they had never reached the finals. This is because he misunderstood what the Elite section is about. Africans were not performing as well in the Elite section only because they had not been exposed to that particular old format. But even his point is moot because, as I pointed out in that thread, an African country DID (recently) start playing the Elite format and in 2016 DID produce a finalist, who displaced the great Nigel Richards (to number 3). Wikipedia was still behind.

If you really did follow this discussion and still came to the conclusion that Fanhar had the best rebuttal to my argument, then ... [I withhold the rest of my comment, for the sake of keeping the tone of this thread civil].

We have a random variable whose probability function is supposedly a gaussian of mean 64 and sd 12. We would not expect large numbers of +130 or +145 instances from 2 million samples.

So *something* is wrong.

Either:

1/ world class scrabble is not very g loaded. - Colour me sceptical. These guys need to learn a large dictionary, spot matches from the dictionary, calculate probabalities so that they can decide when to dump tiles and when and where to place them on the board. The better the calculation the better the performance. High g would seem to be a distinct advantage.

2/ The probability function of our random variable is not a gaussian of mean 64 and sd 12. Either it isn't a mono-modal gaussian, the mean isn't 64, the sd isn't 12 and some or all of these must be *very substantially* wrong.

the problem today is that extremely important decisions depend on the question whether racial IQ differences might exist or not. The common understanding is that they do not exist, thus the only reason for the fact that life in Ghana is worse than in Chile is that the world is somehow unfair / racist / postcolonial / etc to Subsaharan Africa. So to undo this injustice every Subsaharan African has the right to migrate to Korea / France / USA or wherever he wants. So the real question is: is the case for no racial IQ differences strong enough to allow more Afro Chinese than Han Chinese in China and more Afro Indians than Hindu Indians in India by 2100?

No, this is not this kind of argument. Rather, if specific postulated mean and SD for some trait postulates there should not be a single person above some value of the trait, and yet you found ten such people, that means that your postulated mean and SD is suspicious.

Mensa was founded in England in 1946 by Roland Berrill, a barrister, and Dr. Lance Ware, a scientist and lawyer. They had the idea of forming a society for bright people, the only qualification for membership of which was a high IQ. The original aims were, as they are today, to create a society that is non-political and free from all racial or religious distinctions. The society welcomes people from every walk of life whose IQ is in the top 2% of the population, with the objective of enjoying each other’s company and participating in a wide range of social and cultural activities.

Mensa Workout

You have half an hour to answer 30 questions. Answers to the questions and discussion of the answers are provided at the time you submit your answers. While there is a 30-minute time limit to take the test, the amount of time you actually take in no way affects your final score. This is due to the differences in transmission times on the internet, and server loads.

Anyhow, while these might have once been factors, they have ceased to be of any import. There are huge openings databases on sites like Chess Tempo. The information content there is probably an order of magnitude larger than in the entirety of the Soviet chess literature. You can play online, or download a free chess engine like Stockfish that is about 2 S.D. better than the top grandmaster. Virtually all of the classic literature on chess is floating around in PDF format. Lots of the software is free, and much of what isn’t, can be pirated (which of course can be done completely without risk in Africa).

And before you make the obvious rejoinder, the Africans do now have Internet access – Nigeria, S. Africa, and Kenya are at 50%, even Ethiopia is at above 10%.

At least Chanda seems to have stopped using "the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces" to explain African underperformance. That is progress.

Anatoly, but does that mean you believe Gabon’s average IQ to be below 70?

I’d say that no matter how many tournaments are there, Gabon has too small a population to produce enough people who could become top players with IQ below 70 and SD12, given that to become a top player some minimal IQ would be required.

In Classique, Nigel Richards surely is very intelligent guy, winning english scrabble and once French scrabble. Yet in 2016 he was 4th, one Gabonian and two guys from Cote d’Ivoire above him.
You can see that there are SOME French players in Classique tournaments.

So if Gabon would have IQ64 nd SD12, then even with minimal IQ threshold of 100 there would be 2000 people eligible for even playing. I guess no matter how unpopular classique scrabble is in France, there should be at least 2000 players in this nation? For IQ70 and SD15, and minimal IQ 100 there would be 32000 people in Gabon eligible; but do anyoe expects that everyone in Gabon who is intelligent enough, is playing Scrabble? I mean, how popular scrabble can be, do you think that attracting say 5% of eligible people to play professionally (which require training hours every day) is realistic?

In short, I think the scrabble puzzle pretty much cannot be solved without assuming average IQ for Gabon as significantly higher than

Forgot about one Chisala's argument: why there are not a lot of Jewish women in top players. Indeed, we would expect there to be a lot of Jewish women and I have no explanation for this one.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

I think szopen’s statement is an excellent point and goes a long way to explaining the sex differences at high levels. Especially given that in my experience women are if anything overrepresented in casual Scrabble play (especially if you compare to something like chess!) and are quite competitive at that level (which I tend to attribute to verbal facility). One question that goes along with that observation is how different is casual from competitive Scrabble? I think a fair bit (e.g. extensive focused memorization of key word lists, possibly verbal vs. spatial importance?), and if the differences favor males in competitive Scrabble that would be another partial explanation.

This need for practice ties in with one of Chanda’s points:

There should still (statistically) be no single person from African countries like Gabon. And yet they exist, constantly outperforming math professors and computer scientists from the developed world.

Competing at the top levels in Scrabble (I believe) requires extensive practice time over years. There is a comparative advantage argument here that people who have better things to do with their time (or stated more charitably, time consuming primary/other activities) are less likely to excel at Scrabble even given comparable potential.

The obvious follow on question is: can we support this hypothesis? I don’t think we have data to do so, but let me sketch some thoughts.

1. Tendency of potential elite Scrabble players to have other things to do professionally.
2. Tendency of potential elite Scrabble players to choose Scrabble as their preferred recreation.

Question 1. could be answered empirically somewhat. How do the professional backgrounds and practice regimens of elite non/African Scrabble players compare?

Question 2. can also be answered empirically. How do the Scrabble/chess/etc. pipelines compare in the different countries?

Back to comparative advantage, I think it would help to look at the reasons people choose to play elite Scrabble vs. other activities. One last partial explanation would be if the stereotypical extemporaneous verbal facility of blacks translates to Scrabble providing both increased ability and incentive to choose this activity.

Overall I like thinking about this problem as a series of filters acting on the Scrabble ability (with IQ only being a partial proxy, this becomes important if the other ability probability distributions are less tilted against, or even favor, Africans) probability distribution. Here’s a proposal for a Scrabble player profile with filters (of course the “thresholds” are soft).

Any thoughts on the validity/utility of this train of thought? How about the impact of the other requirements on the representation of African players at the elite levels of Scrabble?

This comment does not have much rigor or any data, but hopefully it offers some food for thought. I think there are testable hypotheses embedded here (e.g. population distributions in Scrabble “pipeline”, different game prevalence in different cultures) if we only had data.

Szopen: However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

I think szopen’s statement is an excellent point and goes a long way to explaining the sex differences at high levels.

No.

Szopen forgets a point I keep repeating: the gender disparity in Scrabble championship begins *before* that professional adult level (where many hours are spent per day): it is there quite early in high school. The top Scrabble finalists are almost always boys, even with high female participation.

No, this is not this kind of argument. Rather, if specific postulated mean and SD for some trait postulates there should not be a single person above some value of the trait, and yet you found ten such people, that means that your postulated mean and SD is suspicious.

These scrabble articles remind me of a chapter in Alice in Wonderland.

53 years ago I knew an African student who was in Stanford’s aeronautical engineering program. Therefore all Africans are capable of being Stanford
AEs. What everyone else in the program wondered what he would do when he got home. There were no aircraft factories in I think it was Nigeria. Better if Africans learned to be pilots and mechanics.

Little did we naive baby boomers know that TPTB intended to replace us and our children with HI B visa holders.

But that one guy is positive proof that all Africans have high enough IQs to be Stanford engineers

that´s not the point, it´s not about "all Africans". Most Europeans as well as most Africans are not able to become Stanford AEs. The question is how the distributions look like, and under the hypothesis that SSA have an IQ distribution with an average of 75 and an SD of 15 the good results in Scrabble are extremely unlikely, in a way that the hypothesis actually can´t be true.

IQ tests are doubtlessly important in numerous fields, but IQ fundamentalists are simply- boring. For instance, one thing IQ-obsessives generally do not consider is historicity, which cannot be measured. Take any field of human intellectual achievement, there are asymmetries than cannot be explained: why an incomparable explosion of abstract thinking in German-speaking lands from, say, 1770-1830 (Hamann, Herder, Euler, Kant, Baader, Schelling, Hegel, ...); why are mathematicians from France & German-speaking lands so superior to those of England, Italy or any other country in the world, in this period (Laplace, Lagrange (from Italy), Poisson, Fourier, Cauchy, Euler, Gauss, Bernoullis, ..); why did Industrial revolution, first phase, happen in England & Scotland, and why has evolutionary biology produced so many great scientists in England, and so few in France and Germany; why are Jews so overrepresented in mathematics & physics in past 100 years, while their contribution from 1850. to 1900. had not been spectacular at all, with only a few names I can think of (Jacobi, Sylvester, Herz) ?

Human creativity is not reducible to IQ & it has too many variables we don't know about. Chess, scrabble ... nice, but I don't see it matters in life.

fundamentalists are simply- boring

That’s the case with all fundamentalists. Fundamentalism reveals psychological needs of its adherents. It is like honey for bees or extremist for flies.

These are good points about what you call asymmetry. One may wonder why and with what consequences British philosophers are “empiricists”, German are “idealists” and French “rationalists”?

Prior to emancipation of Jews during Napoleonic times, Jews practically had zero contribution to what we understand as Western civilization: no Jewish science, mathematics, art, architecture, literature.

Jews seem to adapt to the standards of the adopted country, Among composers, in German-Austrian lands you got Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg ... in the US- Gershwin and Copeland, who are not quite the summit of anything. Similar with Kafka, Hoffmannstahl, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Hermann Broch, Doeblin, Paul Celan, ..vs Saul Bellow, Mailer, Heller, Ginsburg and Philip Roth.
Also, creativity certainly waxes & wanes: German dominance in mathematics from, say, 1770. to 1940. ended with WW II. No world -important German mathematician in past 50 years.

Anyway, I don't see African or African-American significant mathematicians, physicists, biologists, writers, thinkers, artists, ... in past 100 years or so. Of course, if you count hip-hop as art, I'm wrong ....

These scrabble articles remind me of a chapter in Alice in Wonderland.

53 years ago I knew an African student who was in Stanford's aeronautical engineering program. Therefore all Africans are capable of being Stanford
AEs. What everyone else in the program wondered what he would do when he got home. There were no aircraft factories in I think it was Nigeria. Better if Africans learned to be pilots and mechanics.

Little did we naive baby boomers know that TPTB intended to replace us and our children with HI B visa holders.

But that one guy is positive proof that all Africans have high enough IQs to be Stanford engineers

that´s not the point, it´s not about “all Africans”. Most Europeans as well as most Africans are not able to become Stanford AEs. The question is how the distributions look like, and under the hypothesis that SSA have an IQ distribution with an average of 75 and an SD of 15 the good results in Scrabble are extremely unlikely, in a way that the hypothesis actually can´t be true.

maybe it is just because I have read not enough but it strikes that after all those years of reading about HBD etc. the arguments of Chisala are the first good counter arguments against HBD which I have ever read. The reason for that is I think that Chisala actually takes the HBD position seriously and tries to disprove it, while most mainstream researchers think HBD is ridiculous or evil anyway, so no one needs to look at the data in a serious way.

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

An IQ test can be normed to any population. I believe an effort is made to be consistent with the norms used when making between country comparisons. There are issues with test language, but those don’t apply for non-verbal tests (e.g. Raven’s [Advanced] Progressive Matrices).

There is potentially an issue of different relative abilities (e.g. verbal, math, spatial) changing the calculated composition of “g” (hence IQ scoring), but I haven’t seen that explored in a research paper.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

I assume you are familiar with the phrase “False Equivalence”?

The NBA is a good example because it integrated relatively early: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
Your statement is literally wrong (first black in the NBA in 1950), but that does not invalidate your overall point here. I do think you can make a strong argument that cultural and other environmental changes are responsible for the change in proportion of blacks in the NBA from 1950-2017. That link has a nice plot of racial composition of the NBA from 1990-2013. We can see that the B/W composition has not changed much over that time. What we see is black representation changing earlier as the environmental and cultural negatives were eliminated allowing apparent natural superiority (e.g. wingspan, athletic explosiveness, improvisational skill ?) to show as overrepresentation. This transition was largely complete by 1990 which is also what we see with the test score gap.

The key point against your position is that despite open (preferred in admissions now even) access to education in the US the ability gap has not closed completely and the narrowing has now plateaued. I think the argument that the gap for blacks in the US now is largely representative of underlying ability is difficult to refute. There is likely room to reduce the African gap by environmental changes, but it is unclear what proportion of the difference would change.

WHY HAS BLACK-WHITE SKILL CONVERGENCE STOPPED? public.econ.duke.edu/~hf14/teaching/povertydisc/readings/neal2006.pdf
I thought Table 1 showing the educational gap over the last century was especially interesting.

And as for your “whites” comment, it’s worth considering what someone makes of the relative Asian and Jewish IQ scores before drawing conclusions.

If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know.

Please do so.

Regarding your final paragraph. Achievement is a result of ability accompanied by effort (plus some luck ; ). Both matter. Attempting to attribute all success to effort is as mistaken as the reverse (well, perhaps more mistaken given the measured heritability of IQ, it’s not just about prepping).

If the mean IQ is 80, than the underlying "genetic" potential IQ (with better nutrition, reduced disease load) might easily be in the mid '90s - ie South Italian levels.

If the mean IQ is 80, than the underlying “genetic” potential IQ (with better nutrition, reduced disease load) might easily be in the mid ’90s – ie South Italian levels.

This is the interesting (and important) question. I think it’s difficult to justify a mid-90s figure. The US black results provide a credible estimate of the max IMHO. However, I do believe that African elite intellects were underrepresented in slaves who survived. In combination with an elite subpopulation argument (e.g. Igbos) it is possible the African genetic mean is higher than seen in US blacks. I don’t have a sense of the relative sizes of possible elite black subpopulations in the US and Africa.

The reason I think much of the explanation lies in elite subpopulations is how important different means become in the proportion represented in the far right tail levels. Does anyone have IQ data for individual African tribes?

African nominal national IQs are artificially depressed by more than 30 IQ points due to an extremely deficient cognitive environment.

As somebody once said, “Man is his own environment.’ Blacks are less intelligent because they’re generally surrounded by other blacks. The problem, of course, isn’t blackness, as such, but what blackness is a proxy for. Chisala, you ain’t convincing anybody.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it.

It gets better. Reaction Times are correlated with "G". It is divided into two parts: one, real reaction time, correlated with "g" (from noticing signal to release button) and muscular time, not correlated with "g" (from releasing one button to push another button). So, in the same task, black do well on purely physical measure, not correlated with "g", while poorly on the part of the task correlated with "g". Amazing, innit? Surely it is because in the same task, blacks do well on physical part because it matters to them, while not on psychological task because it does not matter to them. Wow!

Do you know of any data looking at both IQ and reaction time across races? I think we could learn much about the genetic structure of g if blacks have lower average g but similar average reaction time. Correlating that with racial frequency differences/similarities in IQ related SNPs would give some insight into non/reaction time related genetic aspects of g.

350 black South African 9 year old children were compared with 239 white British children on the Standard Progressive Matrices and 12 reaction time tests giving measures of decision times, movement times and variabilities in tasks of varying complexity. The black children obtained a mean IQ of approximately 65. They also had slower decision times and greater variabilities than the white children, but they had faster movement times. The magnitude of the white advantage on decision times was 0.68 of a standard deviation, about one third of the white advantage on the Progressive Matrices. The result suggests that around one third of the white advantage on intelligence tests may lie in faster information processing capacity.

maybe it is just because I have read not enough but it strikes that after all those years of reading about HBD etc. the arguments of Chisala are the first good counter arguments against HBD which I have ever read. The reason for that is I think that Chisala actually takes the HBD position seriously and tries to disprove it, while most mainstream researchers think HBD is ridiculous or evil anyway, so no one needs to look at the data in a serious way.

I agree. I do wish his pieces were shorter (as I do with respect to most contributors here). Of course, his headlines are designed more to grab attention than to state a deliberate conclusion.

Do you know of any data looking at both IQ and reaction time across races? I think we could learn much about the genetic structure of g if blacks have lower average g but similar average reaction time. Correlating that with racial frequency differences/similarities in IQ related SNPs would give some insight into non/reaction time related genetic aspects of g.

350 black South African 9 year old children were compared with 239 white British children on the Standard Progressive Matrices and 12 reaction time tests giving measures of decision times, movement times and variabilities in tasks of varying complexity. The black children obtained a mean IQ of approximately 65. They also had slower decision times and greater variabilities than the white children, but they had faster movement times. The magnitude of the white advantage on decision times was 0.68 of a standard deviation, about one third of the white advantage on the Progressive Matrices. The result suggests that around one third of the white advantage on intelligence tests may lie in faster information processing capacity.

Lead poisoning may account for that, as it may interfere with myelination, which in turn affects reaction times; the study you cite was published in 1990. A relevant follow-up study would try to replicate that result, e.g. in USA or RSA (with blacks; coloureds are still disproportionately affected), now.

Thanks! Did you look at the full text? It looked to me like there was an error in the first row of Table 1 (the SD difference does not match the data AFAICT). Overall I had trouble pulling conclusions from the text even though the abstract is clear.

I feel that blacks domination in scrabble is overstated. E.g., there is one black among thirty listed as Top 2 in the world championship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Scrabble_Championship

Take a look at the table just below that. The results are consistent with a gap, but smaller than 100 compared to 70-80. I don’t think Chanda is postulating dominance–rather a smaller (nonexistent?) IQ gap than commonly quoted for African countries.

Even with a relatively small gap I would not expect representation at the very top. Even seeing one champion is a strong argument IMHO.

What I find most surprising is how many New Zealanders, Canadians, and Thais there are in the top two given their relatively low overall totals.

It would be interesting to take that table of national representation, add IQ means and SDs, add populations, add primary languages (e.g. see underrepresentation of France), and then do some numerical analysis to see how that compares to the relatively informal (non-quantitative in detail) arguments Chanda presents.

That's the case with all fundamentalists. Fundamentalism reveals psychological needs of its adherents. It is like honey for bees or extremist for flies.

These are good points about what you call asymmetry. One may wonder why and with what consequences British philosophers are "empiricists", German are "idealists" and French "rationalists"?

Prior to emancipation of Jews during Napoleonic times, Jews practically had zero contribution to what we understand as Western civilization: no Jewish science, mathematics, art, architecture, literature.

Jews seem to adapt to the standards of the adopted country, Among composers, in German-Austrian lands you got Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg … in the US- Gershwin and Copeland, who are not quite the summit of anything. Similar with Kafka, Hoffmannstahl, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Hermann Broch, Doeblin, Paul Celan, ..vs Saul Bellow, Mailer, Heller, Ginsburg and Philip Roth.
Also, creativity certainly waxes & wanes: German dominance in mathematics from, say, 1770. to 1940. ended with WW II. No world -important German mathematician in past 50 years.

Anyway, I don’t see African or African-American significant mathematicians, physicists, biologists, writers, thinkers, artists, … in past 100 years or so. Of course, if you count hip-hop as art, I’m wrong ….

Among artists we already have some big ones but i always think composers, in the case of music, matter more than the singers, so i don't know what is the % of great black/afro american singers who are/were great composers too.

"African-American significant ....writers" - You could find some good A-A writers but most of them are concerned with Black experience. Jewish writers like Broch, J. Roth, Kafta and even Doeblin did not concerned themselves with Jewish experience. Many readers were not aware that the writers were Jewish. It was only later when Jewish social position was secured that writers like P. Roth and Bellow overtly dealt with the Jewish experience at expense of universalism. This is an issue of assimilation and mimicry that is different for Jews and Blacks. Blacks cannot practice mimicry so they are thrown into limiting and toxic environment of racial identity politics from the day one while Jews could avoid it by practicing mimicry.

Still it took over 100 years after emancipation of Jews for Jews to produce mainstream writers in Germany and Europe in general. The same goes for composers with an exception of Mendelssohn who was an exception (Pushkin was 1/8 African). But there were plenty of Jewish virtuoso musicians who were treated like some sport celebrities now, i.e., admired but not really respected or considered equal (Isaac Babel has a good story about Wunderkind virtuosos in Odessa and their families scheming to capitalize on it.)

The question is what was holding Jews back for over 100 years? It wasn't g or IQ according to HBD crowd, right? So what was it? As you have said the fundamentalist are boring, i.e., unimaginative. The same crowd is not willing to give a similar grace period to Blacks. They will concentrate on A-A criminality forgetting that in late 19 and early 20 century central Europe and Russia Jews were heavily involved in crime activities of all sorts. Till now the criminal slangs in Russia and Poland are dominated by Yiddish expressions and words.

You can define a factor “chess IQ” which is independent of g. A rough way to norm it would be to say that every 10 points of either “chess IQ” or standard IQ is worth 100 Elo rating points, with a base of Elo 1600 for chess IQ = standard IQ = 100, assuming the player made a good effort to reach his potential as a chessplayer. You can be an expert and a dummy, but practically all masters are at least average in standard intelligence, and you don’t get to be a GM without being cleverer than the average person. All world champions are high in both chess IQ and standard IQ, with Steinitz, Lasker, Euwe, and Botvinnik having a greater contribution from standard IQ, while most others had a greater contribution from chess IQ. Fischer was indeed very smart although his education was poor; Kasparov is no dummy either but I’d put his chess IQ at 180 and you can do the math. (I personally have no special chess talent but reached master based on general intelligence; because chess IQ is more correlated with performance at faster time limits, I suck at blitz chess but was a senior master in correspondence play, qualifying for the U.S. championship final 7 or 8 times though I usually finished in the bottom half and never contended for the title).

The main statistical point Chisala overlooks is that when you mix populations with different means, the resulting population will not follow a normal distribution; if you renorm the test so that scores in the combined population follow percentiles appropriately, then the original subpopulations won’t come out normally distributed, and if the subpopulations don’t mix much, then this phenomenon will persist through the generations. Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble “anomaly” without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble “anomaly” without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

But you already argued that chess ability and IQ are not the same thing, confirming that there is more to intelligence than IQ. So why assume that Africans must have a high IQ to be top scrabble players? They may just have a high Scrabble Aptitude.

This, of course, is unacceptable to an IQ-ist since it means that they are not necessarily smarter in some, and perhaps most, domains of cognitive activity than someone with a lower IQ than their own. This totally destroys the Fascistic idea of ranking all humanity with an IQ label, and granting them status accordingly.

The main statistical point Chisala overlooks is that when you mix populations with different means, the resulting population will not follow a normal distribution

Without even questioning your abstraction here, I should state that you are overlooking an even vigger point. These achievements are not just true about "Africa" as a unit, they are true about individual African nations (Gabon etc), including ones with too few different tribes in their populations to make your point even slightly meaningful.

Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble “anomaly” without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

Firstly, as I state above, this is not just true when your unit is the combined population of "Africa".

Secondly, if this outlier sub-population argument that keeps being made was true, then, as I -- and even Cochran on the other side -- have already argued, you would have seen achievements among those tribes that are similar to the intellectual achievements of at least similarly populated (small) European populations with that IQ and SD (the Igbo alone are almost 20 million in population and they don't just aspire to be Scrabble champions!).

If you say this high IQ is only manifested in games for some strange reason, then you can't also keep using intellectual achievement gaps between populations/races as evidence of IQ gaps (since it would mean those weird outlier African tribes have clearly strange choices for the use of their European-level IQ!). Which, in turn, would undermine your own case since that's how you arrived here, and since it is what your hypothesis was set up to explain in the first place. Do you understand now?

African nominal national IQs are artificially depressed by more than 30 IQ points due to an extremely deficient cognitive environment.

As somebody once said, "Man is his own environment.' Blacks are less intelligent because they're generally surrounded by other blacks. The problem, of course, isn't blackness, as such, but what blackness is a proxy for. Chisala, you ain't convincing anybody.

Forgot about one Chisala's argument: why there are not a lot of Jewish women in top players. Indeed, we would expect there to be a lot of Jewish women and I have no explanation for this one.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

Any mental activity should be SOMEHOW correlated with IQ, but the correlation might be very weak and might not be detectable at higher levels. THose activities with low correlation or which stop to correlate after reaching some level are not good proxies of IQ (of "g", to be more correct; but I hope we all understand here that when saying "iq" we are really thinking about "g").

It's no revelation that there are many talents and "g" does not explain everything. Hence the hierarchical, most popular model for intelligence accepted by, in my impression, most people knowable in the domain I read. That is, while there might be correlation even between "g" and ability to play Tetris, at the same time there is some particular set of specific abilities which are more related to mental rotation of the objects than to some others.

This is not a mental gymnastics or dancing around the facts, but rather the description of most basic findings of psychometrics.

Jews seem to adapt to the standards of the adopted country, Among composers, in German-Austrian lands you got Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg ... in the US- Gershwin and Copeland, who are not quite the summit of anything. Similar with Kafka, Hoffmannstahl, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Hermann Broch, Doeblin, Paul Celan, ..vs Saul Bellow, Mailer, Heller, Ginsburg and Philip Roth.
Also, creativity certainly waxes & wanes: German dominance in mathematics from, say, 1770. to 1940. ended with WW II. No world -important German mathematician in past 50 years.

Anyway, I don't see African or African-American significant mathematicians, physicists, biologists, writers, thinkers, artists, ... in past 100 years or so. Of course, if you count hip-hop as art, I'm wrong ....

Among artists we already have some big ones but i always think composers, in the case of music, matter more than the singers, so i don’t know what is the % of great black/afro american singers who are/were great composers too.

Might excellence at Scrabble be more reflective of a particular aspect of intelligence not necessarily directly correlated with IQ? Similar perhaps to "musical talent?"

Might excellence at Scrabble be more reflective of a particular aspect of intelligence not necessarily directly correlated with IQ? Similar perhaps to “musical talent?”

Here we go, the IQists last resort in the face of overwhelming refutation of their beloved theory. Any talent that does not correlate with IQ can’t be a manifestation of intelligence: it’s gotta be a savant ability, or something a bit weird like Mozart’s musical gift, or Richard Feynman’s (IQ 124) Nobel Prize winning work in quantum electrodynamics, or these darned Africans whipping every American’s arse, black or white, at Scrabble.

But you’d think, wouldn’t you, that however culturally weird these Africans are, there’d be a few of those much more intelligent Americans who’d have the same fixation for Scrabble playing as the Africans and would show the Africans whose boss.

There is no "last resort'" defence. The psychometry is accurate when describing the populations, the larger, the better. Hence, in large group of people, comparing people with IQ 123 and IQ150, you will expect far more accomplished scientists in the group of IQ150. The exceptions however exists. Moreover, while "g" describes the correlation between different mental abilities, it does not explain all variance in all abilities; that is, to each ability there is something "special" which is not explained by "g" alone. This hierarchical model of intelligence is quote old and well known. "G" describes general intelligence; kind of the cognitive ability/quality which might be applied in all mental abilities, though in some more helpful than in others. There might be however dozens of more specific skills and abilities. Surely ability to play Tetris, as I play above, is a result of training, some sopecific abilities related to mental rotation of objects, but also will reflect some general quality of the nervous system.

From your comment 68: "Are skill at punctuation and grammar good proxies for IQ?"

If you are going to make comments like that you should probably make more of an effort to avoid statements like: "would show the Africans whose boss."

And to add something substantive (unlike in your comment 68), nobody is asserting "darned Africans whipping every American’s arse, black or white, at Scrabble." A quick look at the Scrabble championship results will make clear that is not the case.

I knew Feynman. That "124" figure is obviously just a defective measurement, as can easily happen with children. He was very smart in the IQ-test sense as well as in a lot of other ways.

By the way, in order to avoid a charge of vacuousness ("your 'chess IQ' is simply a stand-in for everything that standard IQ doesn't measure"), I can give some empirical tests: given two chessplayers of similar Elo strength, the one with the higher standard IQ will be worse at blitz chess, better at correspondence chess, will have first reached each rating level at later ages, and will do worse at first and better over time in head-to-head games.

The most extreme examples I can think of are Reshevsky and Lasker. Fischer was an unusual case, he was thought to have the most extreme "chess talent" because he had GM-level results at age 14, but he was both very intelligent and extraordinarily hard-working, studious, and focused, compared to other children of comparable "natural talent", and this hard work paid off better at ages 10-14 than it would have if it had been done at ages 14-18, as is more typical.

I imagine the most important feature of a Scrabble player is somebody with a good memory and vocabulary. Not much more is needed. There is no real strategy since you don't know what letters the other player has or his allowable moves to develop blocking strategies like in chess.

Memory is just one component of IQ. Memory helps in some areas of testing but means nothing in spatial reasoning.

IQ tests is just like if you compare a wolf and a dog in their capacities to learn a set of rules via human owners.

For us to solve a problem we need first have well internalized this ”set of rules”, aka, technics, to apply them into the problems, trying solve it.

A dog WHO have less automatic [already born knowing] but more pro-social instincts than the wolf will be naturally more motivated to learn ”new” things, in other frank words, to be trained.

We can define what IQ measure also as ”comparative evaluation of civilizational training”.

Because blacks has been less shaped by civilization machine they no have aquired, intergenerationally speaking, in the same levels, this intrinsic potentialities than whites and specially than east asians, that have been in more stable societies for long time than whites, seems.

More instinctive species are more practical than abstract and IQ is everything about use or apply learned and/or acquired abstractions [vocabulary, maths, other derivative knowledges]. Instead you solve problem via practical, try and error on live, you use internalized knowledge to solve it, more clever, less mortality rates.

Blacks develop faster since early age than whites and east asians, on avg, what racialist literature has reported. I believe more instinctive people also in white and east asian populations will be more prone to develop faster and to score lower in IQ tests. This explain ”entire’ behavioral precocity among blacks and other similar populations and also reflects how time the brain need to fully develop. When brain fully develop, logically speaking, it’s expected that entire organism also have developed.

Maybe, ”blacks”, on avg, be little more equally good to solve problem via more practical language than abstract.

I liked your illustration with wolf-dog analogy but I doubt that Blacks would like it. Anyway, a dog doesn't have any extra special genes that wolf would not have. But it is lacking genes (responsible for independence and aggressiveness) that prevent wolf from behaving and learning like a dog. Still a wolf can solve some problems independently that a dog cannot. When confronted with a difficult problem a dog seek a human for a help. Dog is more social. Civilization, culture are social. And intelligence are part of it. It can't exist apart for culture.

You can define a factor "chess IQ" which is independent of g. A rough way to norm it would be to say that every 10 points of either "chess IQ" or standard IQ is worth 100 Elo rating points, with a base of Elo 1600 for chess IQ = standard IQ = 100, assuming the player made a good effort to reach his potential as a chessplayer. You can be an expert and a dummy, but practically all masters are at least average in standard intelligence, and you don't get to be a GM without being cleverer than the average person. All world champions are high in both chess IQ and standard IQ, with Steinitz, Lasker, Euwe, and Botvinnik having a greater contribution from standard IQ, while most others had a greater contribution from chess IQ. Fischer was indeed very smart although his education was poor; Kasparov is no dummy either but I'd put his chess IQ at 180 and you can do the math. (I personally have no special chess talent but reached master based on general intelligence; because chess IQ is more correlated with performance at faster time limits, I suck at blitz chess but was a senior master in correspondence play, qualifying for the U.S. championship final 7 or 8 times though I usually finished in the bottom half and never contended for the title).

The main statistical point Chisala overlooks is that when you mix populations with different means, the resulting population will not follow a normal distribution; if you renorm the test so that scores in the combined population follow percentiles appropriately, then the original subpopulations won't come out normally distributed, and if the subpopulations don't mix much, then this phenomenon will persist through the generations. Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble "anomaly" without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble “anomaly” without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

But you already argued that chess ability and IQ are not the same thing, confirming that there is more to intelligence than IQ. So why assume that Africans must have a high IQ to be top scrabble players? They may just have a high Scrabble Aptitude.

This, of course, is unacceptable to an IQ-ist since it means that they are not necessarily smarter in some, and perhaps most, domains of cognitive activity than someone with a lower IQ than their own. This totally destroys the Fascistic idea of ranking all humanity with an IQ label, and granting them status accordingly.

CanSpeccy, your reading comprehension is poor. The point is, to reach the top in either chess or scrabble, you need BOTH general and specific aptitudes. You can get good with only one of them, but to be world-class you need both.

Anyhow, while these might have once been factors, they have ceased to be of any import. There are huge openings databases on sites like Chess Tempo. The information content there is probably an order of magnitude larger than in the entirety of the Soviet chess literature. You can play online, or download a free chess engine like Stockfish that is about 2 S.D. better than the top grandmaster. Virtually all of the classic literature on chess is floating around in PDF format. Lots of the software is free, and much of what isn’t, can be pirated (which of course can be done completely without risk in Africa).

And before you make the obvious rejoinder, the Africans do now have Internet access – Nigeria, S. Africa, and Kenya are at 50%, even Ethiopia is at above 10%.

At least Chanda seems to have stopped using "the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces" to explain African underperformance. That is progress.

At least Chanda seems to have stopped using “the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces” to explain African performance. That is progress.

This is just silly and dishonest. You keep omitting the word just before that sentence:”… IGNORING the difficulty…” . The point that I said can be “ignored” is the one you keep presenting as “Chanda’s theory” for explaining African chess performance. It seems you are launching your Mother of All Bombs on an easy straw man because you have failed to answer the harder questions. including the specific questions that I posed to you, based on your claim that Scrabble is a children’s game in America, etc.

I said the point can be “ignored” precisely because it is based only on my own experience, which would make it a weak argument if I actually presented it as “my theory.” I actually know that many children in at least the parts of Africa I’ve been exposed to, loved the game of chess when they learnt it, but they would wait in a line of twenty kids or so just to play with the one chess set that was typically available among such a group in their community. While waiting their turn to play on the one chess set, they would play checkers using bottle tops – with one side turned upside down. Now, you can of course have a different, more sophisticated genetic explanation for why more chess sets were not available among such kids. It intuitively seemed to me that the difficulty of crafting the chess pieces, compared to turning bottle tops upside down, was not a terribly implausible guess.

As for your claim that Fanhar gave the best rebuttal on this subject, I don’t even know what to say to that.

Fanhar gave points that were simply mistaken.

1. He claimed that I gave wrong numbers of players from Nigeria, etc (because I want to win the argument by just lying!). It turns out he did not pay attention to the fact — stated explicitly in my article — that these numbers frequently change, just like any rating system of any game. One thing that could easily alter the numbers significantly is if your country’s players fail to attend some major international tournaments. Etc. I therefore corrected the link to the archived ratings from when I was writing the article, which shows the precise numbers of Nigerians etc that I gave in my article. Which means the problem of explaining those numbers *at any point in history* still remains.

2. He suggested that Africans could not do well in the “Elite” section of French World championships (or something like that), which he supposed was cognitively harder, which is why they had never reached the finals. This is because he misunderstood what the Elite section is about. Africans were not performing as well in the Elite section only because they had not been exposed to that particular old format. But even his point is moot because, as I pointed out in that thread, an African country DID (recently) start playing the Elite format and in 2016 DID produce a finalist, who displaced the great Nigel Richards (to number 3). Wikipedia was still behind.

If you really did follow this discussion and still came to the conclusion that Fanhar had the best rebuttal to my argument, then … [I withhold the rest of my comment, for the sake of keeping the tone of this thread civil].

1. The genetic mean is somewhat higher than the observed mean. I would guess 80-85.
2. Some African populations preferentially focus on Scrabble relatively more than people in other cultures.
3. African greater parity or superiority at non-IQ intellectual aspects of Scrabble (e.g. verbal fluency?). To be clear here, I mean the uncorrelated with g portion. I believe there are racial differences in the balance of components making up g which makes it possible for this to matter more in specific activities (e.g. Scrabble vs. chess).
4. Fat tails/subpopulations.

I have discussed 1-3 in other comments so here I will focus on 4. To his credit, Chanda addresses this head on. I’ll respond to the relevant parts of his original post (let me know if I missed some of the relevant arguments).

Fat Tail?

Fat chance.

Under the racial hypothesis, you cannot explain the presence of Africans at such high levels of cognitive performance even if you assume a “fat tail” – the idea that there are more people at the highest ends than a strict Gaussian distribution would allow. If a statistical fat tail can help Gabon to reach such high levels of performance, why doesn’t the fat tail of white women players (of any cognitive game) also come to their rescue since they are supposed to have even more of them at that level of cognitive ability than any African country? Or more directly, why doesn’t the fat tail help the white (male) children who are supposed to be the IQ equivalent of African adult brains and who, according to some hereditarian bloggers, are supposedly more passionate with the same board games than adults?

I think IQ distributions in general have fat tails based on experimental data. The question at hand is why would this be more true for Africans than other groups. I believe subpopulations are the answer (an open question in my mind is how much of observed IQ fat tails in general is accounted for in this fashion, e.g. Jews in the US). I also addressed the comment about women in an earlier comment.

Regarding the child argument, elite performance at Scrabble requires both absolute IQ (i.e. not age adjusted) and years of dedicated practice. I think that argument is lacking relative to some of the others presented and only weakens your case.

Racial admixture is one possible explanation for fat tails, but probably more relevant to US blacks than Africans

(as an aside, comments like “Fat chance” are IMHO unhelpful in promoting civility in respondents, though rhetorically fun in a blog post, it’s your choice as to which you value more, I’d probably go with fun myself)

Finally, if the fat tail is helping Africans here, then logically, it should also help them achieve at the top of other (academic) areas, where such an IQ would be useful. If you claim that it only works with cognitive games and not academic fields, then that’s a concession that learning resource deficits are the only explanation for lower African IQ or scholastic test scores, which means you can’t also use intellectual achievement comparisons as your evidence for cognitive differences. The same argument goes for why proposing an outlier subpopulation can’t work. You have to decide whether you want to have your cake or eat it.

I consider this the meat of the argument against fat tails (and it is strong IMHO). My response takes two forms.

First, see 1-3 above (though 1 is also arguably covered by this argument, increasing the means decreases the effect size needed from 2 and 3, on reflection this is probably important, if it doesn’t make sense I need to elaborate this aspect of my argument).

Second, I think we do see signs of a black fat tail in other areas (and remember, your argument is not for nonexistence of a black fat tail, it is that there is not one relative to that for other races). I have argued for this in James Thompson’s blog, but am currently uncertain about effect size (there I am actually arguing for a fatter tail than whites). As I noted in the last paragraph, increasing the right tail (either by increased mean or a fat tail) makes a large difference because the normal distribution falls off so steeply in the tails.

My arguments here are colored by having spent a fair amount of time with someone of African descent (immigrant and probably 100%) who has an engineering PhD from an elite institution and was working for a company and in an area that highly valued intelligence AFAICT. Even though he might not be at the very top of his profession, I would expect people like him (or Scrabble champions) to be vanishingly rare if we could take the African IQ mean/SD numbers and normal distribution assumption at face value.

IMO Chanda has a point even if I think he both overstates it a bit and ignores some of the possible explanatory factors.

To conclude, I’d just like to note that fat tails and tribal differences are empirical questions. To really answer those questions we just need to gather the data. Too bad that is so unlikely to ever happen…

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

Are skill at punctuation and grammar good proxies for IQ?

No, they are not.

Any mental activity should be SOMEHOW correlated with IQ, but the correlation might be very weak and might not be detectable at higher levels. THose activities with low correlation or which stop to correlate after reaching some level are not good proxies of IQ (of “g”, to be more correct; but I hope we all understand here that when saying “iq” we are really thinking about “g”).

It’s no revelation that there are many talents and “g” does not explain everything. Hence the hierarchical, most popular model for intelligence accepted by, in my impression, most people knowable in the domain I read. That is, while there might be correlation even between “g” and ability to play Tetris, at the same time there is some particular set of specific abilities which are more related to mental rotation of the objects than to some others.

This is not a mental gymnastics or dancing around the facts, but rather the description of most basic findings of psychometrics.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, from which I draw the following conclusion. There is much to intelligence beside either g or IQ, the latter not being synonymous with the former. If that's correct, I'm happy with it, although I still don't understand the point of g or IQ, except to convince a lot of people that if they have an IQ of x they must be more intelligent that someone with an IQ of < x, which, in the case of any particular cognitive capacity, may be very far from the truth.

Jews seem to adapt to the standards of the adopted country, Among composers, in German-Austrian lands you got Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg ... in the US- Gershwin and Copeland, who are not quite the summit of anything. Similar with Kafka, Hoffmannstahl, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Hermann Broch, Doeblin, Paul Celan, ..vs Saul Bellow, Mailer, Heller, Ginsburg and Philip Roth.
Also, creativity certainly waxes & wanes: German dominance in mathematics from, say, 1770. to 1940. ended with WW II. No world -important German mathematician in past 50 years.

Anyway, I don't see African or African-American significant mathematicians, physicists, biologists, writers, thinkers, artists, ... in past 100 years or so. Of course, if you count hip-hop as art, I'm wrong ....

“African-American significant ….writers” – You could find some good A-A writers but most of them are concerned with Black experience. Jewish writers like Broch, J. Roth, Kafta and even Doeblin did not concerned themselves with Jewish experience. Many readers were not aware that the writers were Jewish. It was only later when Jewish social position was secured that writers like P. Roth and Bellow overtly dealt with the Jewish experience at expense of universalism. This is an issue of assimilation and mimicry that is different for Jews and Blacks. Blacks cannot practice mimicry so they are thrown into limiting and toxic environment of racial identity politics from the day one while Jews could avoid it by practicing mimicry.

Still it took over 100 years after emancipation of Jews for Jews to produce mainstream writers in Germany and Europe in general. The same goes for composers with an exception of Mendelssohn who was an exception (Pushkin was 1/8 African). But there were plenty of Jewish virtuoso musicians who were treated like some sport celebrities now, i.e., admired but not really respected or considered equal (Isaac Babel has a good story about Wunderkind virtuosos in Odessa and their families scheming to capitalize on it.)

The question is what was holding Jews back for over 100 years? It wasn’t g or IQ according to HBD crowd, right? So what was it? As you have said the fundamentalist are boring, i.e., unimaginative. The same crowd is not willing to give a similar grace period to Blacks. They will concentrate on A-A criminality forgetting that in late 19 and early 20 century central Europe and Russia Jews were heavily involved in crime activities of all sorts. Till now the criminal slangs in Russia and Poland are dominated by Yiddish expressions and words.

The same crowd is not willing to give a similar grace period to Blacks. They will concentrate on A-A criminality forgetting that in late 19 and early 20 century central Europe and Russia Jews were heavily involved in crime activities of all sorts.

"Still it took over 100 years after emancipation of Jews for Jews to produce mainstream writers in Germany and Europe in general."

That is a painfully ignorant statement.

Moses Mendelssohn was born in 1729, before any serious moves at Emancipation. I think he had to sneak into Berlin under false pretenses in order to study (being Jewish). Heinrich Heine was born in 1797, right as Emancipation was getting under way. Marx was born only twenty years later. All three are self-evident in their "mainstream" importance to philosophy, literature, and economics respectively.

Nor were they alone. A deeper survey shows German Jews produced several important writers in 19th century Germany, despite being 1% of the populace:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_literature#German_Jewish_literature

In general, Jews started contributing to German and European high culture almost immediately after emancipation, whether legal strictures or the self-imposed limitations of religious orthodoxy.

Perhaps rather than name-calling ("fundamentalists" "boring" "unimaginative") in the future, you could critique your own claims with readily-available evidence?

Might excellence at Scrabble be more reflective of a particular aspect of intelligence not necessarily directly correlated with IQ? Similar perhaps to “musical talent?”

Here we go, the IQists last resort in the face of overwhelming refutation of their beloved theory. Any talent that does not correlate with IQ can't be a manifestation of intelligence: it's gotta be a savant ability, or something a bit weird like Mozart's musical gift, or Richard Feynman's (IQ 124) Nobel Prize winning work in quantum electrodynamics, or these darned Africans whipping every American's arse, black or white, at Scrabble.

But you'd think, wouldn't you, that however culturally weird these Africans are, there'd be a few of those much more intelligent Americans who'd have the same fixation for Scrabble playing as the Africans and would show the Africans whose boss.

There is no “last resort’” defence. The psychometry is accurate when describing the populations, the larger, the better. Hence, in large group of people, comparing people with IQ 123 and IQ150, you will expect far more accomplished scientists in the group of IQ150. The exceptions however exists. Moreover, while “g” describes the correlation between different mental abilities, it does not explain all variance in all abilities; that is, to each ability there is something “special” which is not explained by “g” alone. This hierarchical model of intelligence is quote old and well known. “G” describes general intelligence; kind of the cognitive ability/quality which might be applied in all mental abilities, though in some more helpful than in others. There might be however dozens of more specific skills and abilities. Surely ability to play Tetris, as I play above, is a result of training, some sopecific abilities related to mental rotation of objects, but also will reflect some general quality of the nervous system.

Might excellence at Scrabble be more reflective of a particular aspect of intelligence not necessarily directly correlated with IQ? Similar perhaps to “musical talent?”

Here we go, the IQists last resort in the face of overwhelming refutation of their beloved theory. Any talent that does not correlate with IQ can't be a manifestation of intelligence: it's gotta be a savant ability, or something a bit weird like Mozart's musical gift, or Richard Feynman's (IQ 124) Nobel Prize winning work in quantum electrodynamics, or these darned Africans whipping every American's arse, black or white, at Scrabble.

But you'd think, wouldn't you, that however culturally weird these Africans are, there'd be a few of those much more intelligent Americans who'd have the same fixation for Scrabble playing as the Africans and would show the Africans whose boss.

From your comment 68: “Are skill at punctuation and grammar good proxies for IQ?”

If you are going to make comments like that you should probably make more of an effort to avoid statements like: “would show the Africans whose boss.”

And to add something substantive (unlike in your comment 68), nobody is asserting “darned Africans whipping every American’s arse, black or white, at Scrabble.” A quick look at the Scrabble championship results will make clear that is not the case.

Is that not precisely what the Mind Sports Academy, the organizers of world championships in several cognitive games (including Scrabble, chess, Go, etc), who Chisala cites, have asserted? OK, not exactly. What they have asserted is that one African is currently at least slightly better than the nine best Americans. Sorry that I hyped their claim.

Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble “anomaly” without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

But you already argued that chess ability and IQ are not the same thing, confirming that there is more to intelligence than IQ. So why assume that Africans must have a high IQ to be top scrabble players? They may just have a high Scrabble Aptitude.

This, of course, is unacceptable to an IQ-ist since it means that they are not necessarily smarter in some, and perhaps most, domains of cognitive activity than someone with a lower IQ than their own. This totally destroys the Fascistic idea of ranking all humanity with an IQ label, and granting them status accordingly.

CanSpeccy, your reading comprehension is poor. The point is, to reach the top in either chess or scrabble, you need BOTH general and specific aptitudes. You can get good with only one of them, but to be world-class you need both.

LOL A refined version of the usual IQ-ist put down of anyone who challenges their understanding of intelligence: "you must have a low IQ." And presumably, that's true, because here's what I cannot quite grasp:

g, apparently, is the real McCoy, which IQ correlates with only partially. So if you are exceptionally good at Tetris or Scrabble you must have a high g, even though your IQ may be, frankly, embarrassingly low, like an African's, in fact.

Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble “anomaly” without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

But you already argued that chess ability and IQ are not the same thing, confirming that there is more to intelligence than IQ. So why assume that Africans must have a high IQ to be top scrabble players? They may just have a high Scrabble Aptitude.

This, of course, is unacceptable to an IQ-ist since it means that they are not necessarily smarter in some, and perhaps most, domains of cognitive activity than someone with a lower IQ than their own. This totally destroys the Fascistic idea of ranking all humanity with an IQ label, and granting them status accordingly.

For CanSpeccy and utu the IQ discussion is all about strawmen. See James Thompson's blog if you don't believe me. I have called them out for it enough that it's hard to credit "not realizing it" as an excuse.

350 black South African 9 year old children were compared with 239 white British children on the Standard Progressive Matrices and 12 reaction time tests giving measures of decision times, movement times and variabilities in tasks of varying complexity. The black children obtained a mean IQ of approximately 65. They also had slower decision times and greater variabilities than the white children, but they had faster movement times. The magnitude of the white advantage on decision times was 0.68 of a standard deviation, about one third of the white advantage on the Progressive Matrices. The result suggests that around one third of the white advantage on intelligence tests may lie in faster information processing capacity.

Lead poisoning may account for that, as it may interfere with myelination, which in turn affects reaction times; the study you cite was published in 1990. A relevant follow-up study would try to replicate that result, e.g. in USA or RSA (with blacks; coloureds are still disproportionately affected), now.

IQ tests is just like if you compare a wolf and a dog in their capacities to learn a set of rules via human owners.

For us to solve a problem we need first have well internalized this ''set of rules'', aka, technics, to apply them into the problems, trying solve it.

A dog WHO have less automatic [already born knowing] but more pro-social instincts than the wolf will be naturally more motivated to learn ''new'' things, in other frank words, to be trained.

We can define what IQ measure also as ''comparative evaluation of civilizational training''.

Because blacks has been less shaped by civilization machine they no have aquired, intergenerationally speaking, in the same levels, this intrinsic potentialities than whites and specially than east asians, that have been in more stable societies for long time than whites, seems.

More instinctive species are more practical than abstract and IQ is everything about use or apply learned and/or acquired abstractions [vocabulary, maths, other derivative knowledges]. Instead you solve problem via practical, try and error on live, you use internalized knowledge to solve it, more clever, less mortality rates.

Blacks develop faster since early age than whites and east asians, on avg, what racialist literature has reported. I believe more instinctive people also in white and east asian populations will be more prone to develop faster and to score lower in IQ tests. This explain ''entire' behavioral precocity among blacks and other similar populations and also reflects how time the brain need to fully develop. When brain fully develop, logically speaking, it's expected that entire organism also have developed.

Maybe, ''blacks'', on avg, be little more equally good to solve problem via more practical language than abstract.

I liked your illustration with wolf-dog analogy but I doubt that Blacks would like it. Anyway, a dog doesn’t have any extra special genes that wolf would not have. But it is lacking genes (responsible for independence and aggressiveness) that prevent wolf from behaving and learning like a dog. Still a wolf can solve some problems independently that a dog cannot. When confronted with a difficult problem a dog seek a human for a help. Dog is more social. Civilization, culture are social. And intelligence are part of it. It can’t exist apart for culture.

I don't think every dog when challenged by problem will find a human to help it. We have a lot of dogs who try to solve problems by themselves. My analogy is for "capacity to learn new things and follow rules of authorities". Blacks are on avg less prone for both. We are really talking about domestication levels when we compare human races. And IQ tests seems part of this human training to adapt and to cooperate in big societies even because they has been selected to learn better and faster this skills and to obey the authorities. And domestication have increased human capacity to learn new things and to be more pro social. I'm not saying blacks ARE like wolf than dog because all human populations are more or less "self" domesticated but that blacks are less domesticated than east Asians and whites, little more wolf ( the same for Jews). And I believe the trends to precocious maturation in behavior and body/organism among blacks is a good possible evidence for that because in nature living beings who develop faster or predominantly during its gestation tend to be more instinctive than those who born less "developed". This hiatus between birth and final biological maturation not just increase human plasticity to learn new things but also reflects how longer is the time to the brain fully develop.

I also use this analogy to show that IQ tests for more instinctive and "less" instinctive human beings is like we have a set of commands to the dog being applied for wolves. Seems obvious that they will be worse than the dog.

Instinctives are more practical's and less abstract in their evolutionary strategies.

I get the argument. It's a dumb argument. For many reasons, not the least of which is that its premise--viz., that performance at Scrabble is a more reliable indicator of the mean IQ of a population, than tests which directly measure IQ in members of that population--is so obviously and heinously flawed as to hardly need any external refutation.

Beyond that, Scrabble is a dumb game mostly enjoyed by midwits who like to fancy themselves much smarter than they actually are. The notion that performance at Scrabble should scale linearly with IQ is preposterous, and needs to be demonstrated. Chisala simply assumes facts not in evidence, wildly extrapolating from garbage social "science" papers (Toma et al. 2014, the one she referenced about the IQ of "elite" Scrabble players, used a grand total of n = 26 Scrabble players). This amounts to assuming her conclusion.

That national rates of Scrabble-champion production is being promoted as reliable evidence of national mean IQ, by the same people who decry standard g-loaded IQ tests as "culturally biased," practically beggars belief. Or rather it would, if the limits of these people's analytical ability had not already been so thoroughly exposed.

Beyond that, Scrabble is a dumb game mostly enjoyed by midwits who like to fancy themselves much smarter than they actually are.

Might excellence at Scrabble be more reflective of a particular aspect of intelligence not necessarily directly correlated with IQ? Similar perhaps to “musical talent?”

Here we go, the IQists last resort in the face of overwhelming refutation of their beloved theory. Any talent that does not correlate with IQ can't be a manifestation of intelligence: it's gotta be a savant ability, or something a bit weird like Mozart's musical gift, or Richard Feynman's (IQ 124) Nobel Prize winning work in quantum electrodynamics, or these darned Africans whipping every American's arse, black or white, at Scrabble.

But you'd think, wouldn't you, that however culturally weird these Africans are, there'd be a few of those much more intelligent Americans who'd have the same fixation for Scrabble playing as the Africans and would show the Africans whose boss.

I knew Feynman. That “124″ figure is obviously just a defective measurement, as can easily happen with children. He was very smart in the IQ-test sense as well as in a lot of other ways.

By the way, in order to avoid a charge of vacuousness (“your ‘chess IQ’ is simply a stand-in for everything that standard IQ doesn’t measure”), I can give some empirical tests: given two chessplayers of similar Elo strength, the one with the higher standard IQ will be worse at blitz chess, better at correspondence chess, will have first reached each rating level at later ages, and will do worse at first and better over time in head-to-head games.

The most extreme examples I can think of are Reshevsky and Lasker. Fischer was an unusual case, he was thought to have the most extreme “chess talent” because he had GM-level results at age 14, but he was both very intelligent and extraordinarily hard-working, studious, and focused, compared to other children of comparable “natural talent”, and this hard work paid off better at ages 10-14 than it would have if it had been done at ages 14-18, as is more typical.

By the way, in order to avoid a charge of vacuousness (“your ‘chess IQ’ is simply a stand-in for everything that standard IQ doesn’t measure”), I can give some empirical tests: given two chessplayers of similar Elo strength, the one with the higher standard IQ will be worse at blitz chess, better at correspondence chess, will have first reached each rating level at later ages, and will do worse at first and better over time in head-to-head games.

Thanks for formulating this explicitly. This makes sense to me. Do you know if anyone has ever tried to demonstrate this with data? Or done an extended anecdotal comparison with historical chess figures?

I'm not sure I understand your question. I don't believe they err anywhere. The error lies in the extrapolations that are not suggested by the experiments themselves. Environmentalists are wrong to deny the strong significance of genes (particularly in explaining IQ variance within the same country), and hereditarians are wrong to underestimate environmental contribution to IQ differences between different countries that basically live in different centuries.

So, I will have a complete change of mind about all this if there is an "experiment" of sets of twins separated at birth or early childhood, with one set brought up in an average European environment and another set brought up in average African environment, if such twins will not score at least 2 SDs apart on scholastic or IQ tests of any kind.

No, this is not this kind of argument. Rather, if specific postulated mean and SD for some trait postulates there should not be a single person above some value of the trait, and yet you found ten such people, that means that your postulated mean and SD is suspicious.

CanSpeccy, your reading comprehension is poor. The point is, to reach the top in either chess or scrabble, you need BOTH general and specific aptitudes. You can get good with only one of them, but to be world-class you need both.

CanSpeccy, your reading comprehension is poor.

LOL A refined version of the usual IQ-ist put down of anyone who challenges their understanding of intelligence: “you must have a low IQ.” And presumably, that’s true, because here’s what I cannot quite grasp:

g, apparently, is the real McCoy, which IQ correlates with only partially. So if you are exceptionally good at Tetris or Scrabble you must have a high g, even though your IQ may be, frankly, embarrassingly low, like an African’s, in fact.

So if you are exceptionally good at Tetris or Scrabble you must have a high g, even though your IQ may be, frankly, embarrassingly low, like an African’s, in fact.

NO.

It's like if there was "F" for fitness general factor. OK, the analogy is stupid, but maybe it will help you understand.

So for every physical activity there would be correlation. People with higher "F" would be better at sports overall.

However, there would be also subscores "R" for running and "U" for upper body strength. Of course,
people high of "F" would be, on average, having also high "R" and "U" scores.

Then you would have specific abilities "S" for soccer "T" for tennis and so on.

Now, for any population varying on some ability, say "soccer", part of the variance would be explained by "F". Then part of the remainder by "R", and the remainder by specific "S".

Here, imagine this Tetris thing. Now, people with better quality nervous system would have faster reaction times and so on. So "g" would explain part of the variance. Then you would have some more specific abilities, like "mental rotation", and finally, some specific abilities related to Tetris + expertise.

Now, having high scores in Tetris would not mean high "g" scores. However, you would find some weak correlation between "g" and Tetris scores. I presume very weak. Hence, you could have high "Tetris" score despite having quite average "g" and therefore, also "IQ".

Here, I (and independently others too) postulate that the scrabble puzzle is solved by:
(1) Average IQ much higher than 64 + maybe different SD, and less normal distribution (more fat tail per res and Bill)
(2) weak correlation between "g" and scrabble
(3) existence of specific mental abilities, on which the gap between whites-blacks may be lower than on some others (I've linked a page showing that the gaps are in fact lower on some specific mental abilities, so why not here too?)
(4) higher role of expertise (i.e. how much do you train)

Now I will be just speculating, generating the ideas.

That would mean that, for example, on average people with IQ 115 would have higher chances to be top players than people with IQ of 70, but there would not be discernible difference between 115 and 120. Or maybe some minimal IQ is required, after each there are diminishing returns for having more points: i.e. for compensate for difference between 75 and 115 no amount of training could be possible, for compensate between 100 and 115 5 hours more training would be required, for compensate for a difference between 115 and 130 1 hour more training would be required...

Or maybe you need some specific ability, on which there is no difference between whites-blacks - again, some minimal IQ would be needed, but over that, the differences in that specific ability would matter more (i.e. while you have minimum IQ of say 100, differences in specific ability matters more).

Now, note that all I wrote is perfectly compatible with standard hierarchical model of intelligence (with its standard divisions into Gf and Gc, visuospatial abilities vs verbal etc). Hence saying that you are building strawman by saying that somehow "IQ cultist" think "g" can explain everything.

350 black South African 9 year old children were compared with 239 white British children on the Standard Progressive Matrices and 12 reaction time tests giving measures of decision times, movement times and variabilities in tasks of varying complexity. The black children obtained a mean IQ of approximately 65. They also had slower decision times and greater variabilities than the white children, but they had faster movement times. The magnitude of the white advantage on decision times was 0.68 of a standard deviation, about one third of the white advantage on the Progressive Matrices. The result suggests that around one third of the white advantage on intelligence tests may lie in faster information processing capacity.

Thanks! Did you look at the full text? It looked to me like there was an error in the first row of Table 1 (the SD difference does not match the data AFAICT). Overall I had trouble pulling conclusions from the text even though the abstract is clear.

No, I have seen skimmed over the text and read only similar abstracts of other studies plus I read, of course, their description in the Jensen's fundamental "g factor" book. I am no psychometrician, after all, just an amateur who likes to understand and to know some basic concepts.

This article lacks editing. Brevity, while difficult, is a wonderful thing.

I do not know and can not begin to imagine what IQ is necessary to play Scrabble competitively. But an IQ study of chess grand masters found that the sweet spot was, surprise, 135. No doubt that would apply to checkers, but the range may extend lower as well. Chess and all like games are not all math, geometry, and memory.

I think it's important to mention that the "sweet spot" is probably more an artifact of the interaction of the probability distribution and the fact that skills other than IQ are important.

Per http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx there are ~80x as many people with IQ 135 as there are with IQ 155. 80 chances at a superior set of other skills is probably worth 20 IQ points for chess.

From your comment 68: "Are skill at punctuation and grammar good proxies for IQ?"

If you are going to make comments like that you should probably make more of an effort to avoid statements like: "would show the Africans whose boss."

And to add something substantive (unlike in your comment 68), nobody is asserting "darned Africans whipping every American’s arse, black or white, at Scrabble." A quick look at the Scrabble championship results will make clear that is not the case.

Is that not precisely what the Mind Sports Academy, the organizers of world championships in several cognitive games (including Scrabble, chess, Go, etc), who Chisala cites, have asserted? OK, not exactly. What they have asserted is that one African is currently at least slightly better than the nine best Americans. Sorry that I hyped their claim.

"African-American significant ....writers" - You could find some good A-A writers but most of them are concerned with Black experience. Jewish writers like Broch, J. Roth, Kafta and even Doeblin did not concerned themselves with Jewish experience. Many readers were not aware that the writers were Jewish. It was only later when Jewish social position was secured that writers like P. Roth and Bellow overtly dealt with the Jewish experience at expense of universalism. This is an issue of assimilation and mimicry that is different for Jews and Blacks. Blacks cannot practice mimicry so they are thrown into limiting and toxic environment of racial identity politics from the day one while Jews could avoid it by practicing mimicry.

Still it took over 100 years after emancipation of Jews for Jews to produce mainstream writers in Germany and Europe in general. The same goes for composers with an exception of Mendelssohn who was an exception (Pushkin was 1/8 African). But there were plenty of Jewish virtuoso musicians who were treated like some sport celebrities now, i.e., admired but not really respected or considered equal (Isaac Babel has a good story about Wunderkind virtuosos in Odessa and their families scheming to capitalize on it.)

The question is what was holding Jews back for over 100 years? It wasn't g or IQ according to HBD crowd, right? So what was it? As you have said the fundamentalist are boring, i.e., unimaginative. The same crowd is not willing to give a similar grace period to Blacks. They will concentrate on A-A criminality forgetting that in late 19 and early 20 century central Europe and Russia Jews were heavily involved in crime activities of all sorts. Till now the criminal slangs in Russia and Poland are dominated by Yiddish expressions and words.

The same crowd is not willing to give a similar grace period to Blacks. They will concentrate on A-A criminality forgetting that in late 19 and early 20 century central Europe and Russia Jews were heavily involved in crime activities of all sorts.

For CanSpeccy and utu the IQ discussion is all about strawmen. See James Thompson’s blog if you don’t believe me. I have called them out for it enough that it’s hard to credit “not realizing it” as an excuse.

I knew Feynman. That "124" figure is obviously just a defective measurement, as can easily happen with children. He was very smart in the IQ-test sense as well as in a lot of other ways.

By the way, in order to avoid a charge of vacuousness ("your 'chess IQ' is simply a stand-in for everything that standard IQ doesn't measure"), I can give some empirical tests: given two chessplayers of similar Elo strength, the one with the higher standard IQ will be worse at blitz chess, better at correspondence chess, will have first reached each rating level at later ages, and will do worse at first and better over time in head-to-head games.

The most extreme examples I can think of are Reshevsky and Lasker. Fischer was an unusual case, he was thought to have the most extreme "chess talent" because he had GM-level results at age 14, but he was both very intelligent and extraordinarily hard-working, studious, and focused, compared to other children of comparable "natural talent", and this hard work paid off better at ages 10-14 than it would have if it had been done at ages 14-18, as is more typical.

By the way, in order to avoid a charge of vacuousness (“your ‘chess IQ’ is simply a stand-in for everything that standard IQ doesn’t measure”), I can give some empirical tests: given two chessplayers of similar Elo strength, the one with the higher standard IQ will be worse at blitz chess, better at correspondence chess, will have first reached each rating level at later ages, and will do worse at first and better over time in head-to-head games.

Thanks for formulating this explicitly. This makes sense to me. Do you know if anyone has ever tried to demonstrate this with data? Or done an extended anecdotal comparison with historical chess figures?

Any mental activity should be SOMEHOW correlated with IQ, but the correlation might be very weak and might not be detectable at higher levels. THose activities with low correlation or which stop to correlate after reaching some level are not good proxies of IQ (of "g", to be more correct; but I hope we all understand here that when saying "iq" we are really thinking about "g").

It's no revelation that there are many talents and "g" does not explain everything. Hence the hierarchical, most popular model for intelligence accepted by, in my impression, most people knowable in the domain I read. That is, while there might be correlation even between "g" and ability to play Tetris, at the same time there is some particular set of specific abilities which are more related to mental rotation of the objects than to some others.

This is not a mental gymnastics or dancing around the facts, but rather the description of most basic findings of psychometrics.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, from which I draw the following conclusion. There is much to intelligence beside either g or IQ, the latter not being synonymous with the former. If that’s correct, I’m happy with it, although I still don’t understand the point of g or IQ, except to convince a lot of people that if they have an IQ of x they must be more intelligent that someone with an IQ of < x, which, in the case of any particular cognitive capacity, may be very far from the truth.

Because "g" is a rough but useful first prediction how well you will learn new things, the more complicated and general thing, the better. I would say that it is better when generalising the large populations than about single people, though. I've already linked (or was it res?) the results of the study of group of high-IQ children. Their high-IQ was highly predictive of the success, at very diverse field of things. I.e. given populations A and B and knowing only the "g" difference between them, you could expect quite a lot about the differences in the average outcomes of those populations. You would expect that population with lower average "g" would have lower life expectance, more criminality, less success in very diverse fields and so on.

Might excellence at Scrabble be more reflective of a particular aspect of intelligence not necessarily directly correlated with IQ? Similar perhaps to “musical talent?”

Here we go, the IQists last resort in the face of overwhelming refutation of their beloved theory. Any talent that does not correlate with IQ can't be a manifestation of intelligence: it's gotta be a savant ability, or something a bit weird like Mozart's musical gift, or Richard Feynman's (IQ 124) Nobel Prize winning work in quantum electrodynamics, or these darned Africans whipping every American's arse, black or white, at Scrabble.

But you'd think, wouldn't you, that however culturally weird these Africans are, there'd be a few of those much more intelligent Americans who'd have the same fixation for Scrabble playing as the Africans and would show the Africans whose boss.

I imagine the most important feature of a Scrabble player is somebody with a good memory and vocabulary. Not much more is needed. There is no real strategy since you don’t know what letters the other player has or his allowable moves to develop blocking strategies like in chess.

Memory is just one component of IQ. Memory helps in some areas of testing but means nothing in spatial reasoning.

You are only artially right. The studies I quoted shown that "visual reasoning" whatever it is, is also important in addition to good memory. Also, they indicate that some strategic thinking is involved too, as well as fast calculation.

Wrong. The most important feature of a Scrabble player is high level mathematical ability. The only US citizen to reach the finals of the Spanish World Scrabble Championship is Hector Klie. Klie has a PhD from Rice University in computational engineering.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hector-klie-1618667

Chanda discussed the math ability of Scrabble players extensively in his previous column, but his columns are too long and few people are reading them. I suggest doing a Ctrl-F for "math" in his previous column.

Even "memory" has sub-abilities in it. For instance, I was a one-day champion a couple decades ago on Jeopardy. To be good at that game, the primary talent needed is not necessarily a good memory, it's immediate access to that memory.

There are a great many people who can't come up with the answer in 1/2 second, but have more general knowledge than those who can and would do much better if given 5 or 15 seconds to think about the answer.

But given the rules of the game, wide knowledge and excellent memory are completely useless unless combined with a "knack" for almost-instant recall.

This article lacks editing. Brevity, while difficult, is a wonderful thing.

I do not know and can not begin to imagine what IQ is necessary to play Scrabble competitively. But an IQ study of chess grand masters found that the sweet spot was, surprise, 135. No doubt that would apply to checkers, but the range may extend lower as well. Chess and all like games are not all math, geometry, and memory.

I think it’s important to mention that the “sweet spot” is probably more an artifact of the interaction of the probability distribution and the fact that skills other than IQ are important.

LOL A refined version of the usual IQ-ist put down of anyone who challenges their understanding of intelligence: "you must have a low IQ." And presumably, that's true, because here's what I cannot quite grasp:

g, apparently, is the real McCoy, which IQ correlates with only partially. So if you are exceptionally good at Tetris or Scrabble you must have a high g, even though your IQ may be, frankly, embarrassingly low, like an African's, in fact.

So what the Hell use is it, again, to measure IQ?

So if you are exceptionally good at Tetris or Scrabble you must have a high g, even though your IQ may be, frankly, embarrassingly low, like an African’s, in fact.

NO.

It’s like if there was “F” for fitness general factor. OK, the analogy is stupid, but maybe it will help you understand.

So for every physical activity there would be correlation. People with higher “F” would be better at sports overall.

However, there would be also subscores “R” for running and “U” for upper body strength. Of course,
people high of “F” would be, on average, having also high “R” and “U” scores.

Then you would have specific abilities “S” for soccer “T” for tennis and so on.

Now, for any population varying on some ability, say “soccer”, part of the variance would be explained by “F”. Then part of the remainder by “R”, and the remainder by specific “S”.

Here, imagine this Tetris thing. Now, people with better quality nervous system would have faster reaction times and so on. So “g” would explain part of the variance. Then you would have some more specific abilities, like “mental rotation”, and finally, some specific abilities related to Tetris + expertise.

Now, having high scores in Tetris would not mean high “g” scores. However, you would find some weak correlation between “g” and Tetris scores. I presume very weak. Hence, you could have high “Tetris” score despite having quite average “g” and therefore, also “IQ”.

Here, I (and independently others too) postulate that the scrabble puzzle is solved by:
(1) Average IQ much higher than 64 + maybe different SD, and less normal distribution (more fat tail per res and Bill)
(2) weak correlation between “g” and scrabble
(3) existence of specific mental abilities, on which the gap between whites-blacks may be lower than on some others (I’ve linked a page showing that the gaps are in fact lower on some specific mental abilities, so why not here too?)
(4) higher role of expertise (i.e. how much do you train)

Now I will be just speculating, generating the ideas.

That would mean that, for example, on average people with IQ 115 would have higher chances to be top players than people with IQ of 70, but there would not be discernible difference between 115 and 120. Or maybe some minimal IQ is required, after each there are diminishing returns for having more points: i.e. for compensate for difference between 75 and 115 no amount of training could be possible, for compensate between 100 and 115 5 hours more training would be required, for compensate for a difference between 115 and 130 1 hour more training would be required…

Or maybe you need some specific ability, on which there is no difference between whites-blacks – again, some minimal IQ would be needed, but over that, the differences in that specific ability would matter more (i.e. while you have minimum IQ of say 100, differences in specific ability matters more).

Now, note that all I wrote is perfectly compatible with standard hierarchical model of intelligence (with its standard divisions into Gf and Gc, visuospatial abilities vs verbal etc). Hence saying that you are building strawman by saying that somehow “IQ cultist” think “g” can explain everything.

It’s like if there was “F” for fitness general factor. OK, the analogy is stupid, but maybe it will help you understand.

There you go again. The IQ-ist put-down, you have a comprehension deficit!

But as a physiologist, I don't find the fitness analogy stupid at all. Indeed, I have even suggested several physiological causes of variation in g. See my g is for glutamate, for example. Or a defect or low gain in the GABA-ergic transduction pathway, that seems to play a role in autism, could be another of many factors affecting mental performance.

Further, I don't disagree with much of what you say. But when you say:

That would mean that, for example, on average people with IQ 115 would have higher chances to be top players than people with IQ of 70, but there would not be discernible difference between 115 and 120.

you are talking in vague generalizations only. In specific cases you are spectacularly wrong, e.g., the cases of the three winner of the Nobel Prize in physics that I have already mentioned, and the people who win commercially profitable patents, earn a PhD at 22, hold academic appointments, run successful companies, without necessarily having an exceptional IQ.

Moreover it seems you fail to realize how radically your generalization is refuted in some cases, e.g., the musical genius of Derek Paravicini (IQ less than 35), or the compulsive obsessive genius of not only Feynman, but of Einstein, who spend much time imagining what it would be like to travel with a ray of light, or Jacques Monod, who thought deeply about the conformational transformation of proteins acting as enzyme catalysts.

In general, it seems to me that the obsession with IQ as a determining factor in individual and national success is just about as unsound as Nazi ideology about the superiority of the Nordic type. IQ is a highly culture-loaded measure, and the assumption that you can compare these kids, with these kids by means of an IQ test seems to me totally daft.

Now if you had some physiological measures, that differentiated among racial groups, I'd be more interested.

In the meantime, those stupid Africans are multiplying like crazy, going from 0.9 billion in 2010 to 2.0 billion in 2o50, while those brilliant Americans, Europeans, Askenazi Jews, etc. fail to achieve even a replacement fertility. Whoever may be the dopes here, it is obvious who has the superior Darwinian fitness.

Thanks! Did you look at the full text? It looked to me like there was an error in the first row of Table 1 (the SD difference does not match the data AFAICT). Overall I had trouble pulling conclusions from the text even though the abstract is clear.

No, I have seen skimmed over the text and read only similar abstracts of other studies plus I read, of course, their description in the Jensen’s fundamental “g factor” book. I am no psychometrician, after all, just an amateur who likes to understand and to know some basic concepts.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, from which I draw the following conclusion. There is much to intelligence beside either g or IQ, the latter not being synonymous with the former. If that's correct, I'm happy with it, although I still don't understand the point of g or IQ, except to convince a lot of people that if they have an IQ of x they must be more intelligent that someone with an IQ of < x, which, in the case of any particular cognitive capacity, may be very far from the truth.

Because “g” is a rough but useful first prediction how well you will learn new things, the more complicated and general thing, the better. I would say that it is better when generalising the large populations than about single people, though. I’ve already linked (or was it res?) the results of the study of group of high-IQ children. Their high-IQ was highly predictive of the success, at very diverse field of things. I.e. given populations A and B and knowing only the “g” difference between them, you could expect quite a lot about the differences in the average outcomes of those populations. You would expect that population with lower average “g” would have lower life expectance, more criminality, less success in very diverse fields and so on.

I’ve already linked (or was it res?) the results of the study of group of high-IQ children. Their high-IQ was highly predictive of the success, at very diverse field of things.

The Terman study, you mean, in which the youngsters who were screened out for having an IQ below the threshold of 150, included the only two Nobel Prize winners: William Shockley, for the invention of the transistor, and Luis Alvarez, for the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber.

I imagine the most important feature of a Scrabble player is somebody with a good memory and vocabulary. Not much more is needed. There is no real strategy since you don't know what letters the other player has or his allowable moves to develop blocking strategies like in chess.

Memory is just one component of IQ. Memory helps in some areas of testing but means nothing in spatial reasoning.

I wish people would read comments I have posted.

You are only artially right. The studies I quoted shown that “visual reasoning” whatever it is, is also important in addition to good memory. Also, they indicate that some strategic thinking is involved too, as well as fast calculation.

What is the strategy precisely since you are limited to the letters you have and you do not know what the letters the other players have. Sure you might be able to block somebody from putting down some high valued word but you don't even know if he is capable of spelling it or if the spread of the letters is going to go off in another direction.

On the chessboard you can project the opponents allowable moves and counter-moves many steps ahead. You just don't know which one he will take or his overall strategy. As for visual reasoning, again because you are limited to a random set of letters you are more likely at the whim of chance and your superior vocabulary than any grand strategy.

IMHO these studies are like a lot of studies from social science - a lot of unprovable claims using bogus statistics.

I also think this fast calculation thingy is another misidentification of what is just plain old repetition of playing the game. Look at a game like craps. I don't play it because craps is too fast for drunks. Now when I go to Vegas I see plenty of people who probably couldn't calculate a high school algebra test answer if given all day know exactly what is going on at that table - even if they are drunk.

Now is their seemingly superior fast calculation on the craps table the result of their superior intellect or just the fact that they play craps every chance they get?

"African-American significant ....writers" - You could find some good A-A writers but most of them are concerned with Black experience. Jewish writers like Broch, J. Roth, Kafta and even Doeblin did not concerned themselves with Jewish experience. Many readers were not aware that the writers were Jewish. It was only later when Jewish social position was secured that writers like P. Roth and Bellow overtly dealt with the Jewish experience at expense of universalism. This is an issue of assimilation and mimicry that is different for Jews and Blacks. Blacks cannot practice mimicry so they are thrown into limiting and toxic environment of racial identity politics from the day one while Jews could avoid it by practicing mimicry.

Still it took over 100 years after emancipation of Jews for Jews to produce mainstream writers in Germany and Europe in general. The same goes for composers with an exception of Mendelssohn who was an exception (Pushkin was 1/8 African). But there were plenty of Jewish virtuoso musicians who were treated like some sport celebrities now, i.e., admired but not really respected or considered equal (Isaac Babel has a good story about Wunderkind virtuosos in Odessa and their families scheming to capitalize on it.)

The question is what was holding Jews back for over 100 years? It wasn't g or IQ according to HBD crowd, right? So what was it? As you have said the fundamentalist are boring, i.e., unimaginative. The same crowd is not willing to give a similar grace period to Blacks. They will concentrate on A-A criminality forgetting that in late 19 and early 20 century central Europe and Russia Jews were heavily involved in crime activities of all sorts. Till now the criminal slangs in Russia and Poland are dominated by Yiddish expressions and words.

“Still it took over 100 years after emancipation of Jews for Jews to produce mainstream writers in Germany and Europe in general.”

That is a painfully ignorant statement.

Moses Mendelssohn was born in 1729, before any serious moves at Emancipation. I think he had to sneak into Berlin under false pretenses in order to study (being Jewish). Heinrich Heine was born in 1797, right as Emancipation was getting under way. Marx was born only twenty years later. All three are self-evident in their “mainstream” importance to philosophy, literature, and economics respectively.

Nor were they alone. A deeper survey shows German Jews produced several important writers in 19th century Germany, despite being 1% of the populace:

This is a bit more complicated - most German "Jews" who achieved high prominence had been Christian converts (or descendants of converts). What is puzzling here is not debate on IQ- it's murky, how can one assess intelligence of Hegel or Fichte, since these activities are muddled per definitionem ?-, but the fact that emancipated German Jews so quickly embraced high German/European culture, having actually booted their own ethno-religious culture they'd so tenaciously clung for centuries.

True, there were significant German Jewish writers in the first half of the 19th C (Heine, Boerne,..), but they somehow waned in the 2nd half & emerged in the first half of the 20th C. Perhaps more interesting are exact sciences: as far as I recall, only Carl Jacobi achieved prominence & Eisenstein's premature death left his status as a mathematician opened.

But it is possible that talents follow Čiževskij-Ertel hypothesis on inter-relation of Sun activity & genius; also, this hypothesis, elaborated in Eysenck's book: "Genius", poses that gifted individuals will follow this order- first poetry, then visual arts, then literature, and finally philosophy & sciences.

But this is an aside. "g" in IQ measurement definitely works for numerous areas; just, I am not convinced it covers creativity as well (I mean high creativity); evidently, high IQ does not have anything to do with highest levels of creativity in many fields (Beethoven couldn't learn how to multiply; I also doubt that Michelangelo, or Plato, for that matter, would be proud members of Mensa); also, its ahistoricity cannot explain blossoming of highest levels of achievement in a short span of time in small cities (Galileo, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Machiavelli ... Florentine contemporaries or near-contemporaries)

I knew Feynman. That "124" figure is obviously just a defective measurement, as can easily happen with children. He was very smart in the IQ-test sense as well as in a lot of other ways.

By the way, in order to avoid a charge of vacuousness ("your 'chess IQ' is simply a stand-in for everything that standard IQ doesn't measure"), I can give some empirical tests: given two chessplayers of similar Elo strength, the one with the higher standard IQ will be worse at blitz chess, better at correspondence chess, will have first reached each rating level at later ages, and will do worse at first and better over time in head-to-head games.

The most extreme examples I can think of are Reshevsky and Lasker. Fischer was an unusual case, he was thought to have the most extreme "chess talent" because he had GM-level results at age 14, but he was both very intelligent and extraordinarily hard-working, studious, and focused, compared to other children of comparable "natural talent", and this hard work paid off better at ages 10-14 than it would have if it had been done at ages 14-18, as is more typical.

That “124″ figure is obviously just a defective measurement

Obviously! Otherwise, the IQ-ist theory is refuted. An admirable demonstration, may I say, of how to derive a premise from a desired conclusion.

He was very smart in the IQ-test sense

Verbally? Is that why most of his books were ghosted and why The meaning of It All, which was apparently in his own write, seems very much the work of someone with, well, an IQ of, say, 124.

I’m not sure I understand your question. I don’t believe they err anywhere. The error lies in the extrapolations that are not suggested by the experiments themselves. Environmentalists are wrong to deny the strong significance of genes (particularly in explaining IQ variance within the same country), and hereditarians are wrong to underestimate environmental contribution to IQ differences between different countries that basically live in different centuries.

So, I will have a complete change of mind about all this if there is an “experiment” of sets of twins separated at birth or early childhood, with one set brought up in an average European environment and another set brought up in average African environment, if such twins will not score at least 2 SDs apart on scholastic or IQ tests of any kind.

Obviously! Otherwise, the IQ-ist theory is refuted. An admirable demonstration, may I say, of how to derive a premise from a desired conclusion.

Let me ask you a question. If an adult IQ test result (such as a WAIS test) were discovered, would you expect that it would substantiate the 124 IQ or be much higher? Or would you truly have no expectation?

Consider the kinds of abilities tested on the WAIS: verbal comprehension, spatio-visual ability, and concentration. Is there any question that Feynman was very well-endowed with all? His books are cogently written, his theories require spatial visualization, etc. Are you truly agnostic about whether Feynman has these abilities, that he can't define easy words, see similarities, and solve visual puzzles?

Because "g" is a rough but useful first prediction how well you will learn new things, the more complicated and general thing, the better. I would say that it is better when generalising the large populations than about single people, though. I've already linked (or was it res?) the results of the study of group of high-IQ children. Their high-IQ was highly predictive of the success, at very diverse field of things. I.e. given populations A and B and knowing only the "g" difference between them, you could expect quite a lot about the differences in the average outcomes of those populations. You would expect that population with lower average "g" would have lower life expectance, more criminality, less success in very diverse fields and so on.

I’ve already linked (or was it res?) the results of the study of group of high-IQ children. Their high-IQ was highly predictive of the success, at very diverse field of things.

The Terman study, you mean, in which the youngsters who were screened out for having an IQ below the threshold of 150, included the only two Nobel Prize winners: William Shockley, for the invention of the transistor, and Luis Alvarez, for the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber.

The same crowd is not willing to give a similar grace period to Blacks. They will concentrate on A-A criminality forgetting that in late 19 and early 20 century central Europe and Russia Jews were heavily involved in crime activities of all sorts.

You can make fun all you want of rural red neck whites (and their black neighbors) but these people are generally at least productive enough to support themselves. The urban black underclass is nowhere near that competent.

You are only artially right. The studies I quoted shown that "visual reasoning" whatever it is, is also important in addition to good memory. Also, they indicate that some strategic thinking is involved too, as well as fast calculation.

I read after your comment but I don’t agree.

What is the strategy precisely since you are limited to the letters you have and you do not know what the letters the other players have. Sure you might be able to block somebody from putting down some high valued word but you don’t even know if he is capable of spelling it or if the spread of the letters is going to go off in another direction.

On the chessboard you can project the opponents allowable moves and counter-moves many steps ahead. You just don’t know which one he will take or his overall strategy. As for visual reasoning, again because you are limited to a random set of letters you are more likely at the whim of chance and your superior vocabulary than any grand strategy.

IMHO these studies are like a lot of studies from social science – a lot of unprovable claims using bogus statistics.

Supposedly Kasparov's IQ was measured at around 135, which is decent, but hardly genius level. In fact, Fischer disparaged Kasparov once by referring to him as an idiot savant, while claiming that he himself was a universal genius. :)

"Still it took over 100 years after emancipation of Jews for Jews to produce mainstream writers in Germany and Europe in general."

That is a painfully ignorant statement.

Moses Mendelssohn was born in 1729, before any serious moves at Emancipation. I think he had to sneak into Berlin under false pretenses in order to study (being Jewish). Heinrich Heine was born in 1797, right as Emancipation was getting under way. Marx was born only twenty years later. All three are self-evident in their "mainstream" importance to philosophy, literature, and economics respectively.

Nor were they alone. A deeper survey shows German Jews produced several important writers in 19th century Germany, despite being 1% of the populace:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_literature#German_Jewish_literature

In general, Jews started contributing to German and European high culture almost immediately after emancipation, whether legal strictures or the self-imposed limitations of religious orthodoxy.

Perhaps rather than name-calling ("fundamentalists" "boring" "unimaginative") in the future, you could critique your own claims with readily-available evidence?

Oh, lovely. A 'Jews as parasites' metaphor in response to my simply noting the contributions of Jews to the arts and sciences in the West from our Emancipation forward.

...and someone was complaining above about this wholly legitimate and unresolved issue of possible genetic bases in group intelligence differences between historical human populations as the greatest "blight" on UNZ.

I’ve already linked (or was it res?) the results of the study of group of high-IQ children. Their high-IQ was highly predictive of the success, at very diverse field of things.

The Terman study, you mean, in which the youngsters who were screened out for having an IQ below the threshold of 150, included the only two Nobel Prize winners: William Shockley, for the invention of the transistor, and Luis Alvarez, for the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber.

You are only artially right. The studies I quoted shown that "visual reasoning" whatever it is, is also important in addition to good memory. Also, they indicate that some strategic thinking is involved too, as well as fast calculation.

I also think this fast calculation thingy is another misidentification of what is just plain old repetition of playing the game. Look at a game like craps. I don’t play it because craps is too fast for drunks. Now when I go to Vegas I see plenty of people who probably couldn’t calculate a high school algebra test answer if given all day know exactly what is going on at that table – even if they are drunk.

Now is their seemingly superior fast calculation on the craps table the result of their superior intellect or just the fact that they play craps every chance they get?

You can make fun all you want of rural red neck whites (and their black neighbors) but these people are generally at least productive enough to support themselves. The urban black underclass is nowhere near that competent.

I imagine the most important feature of a Scrabble player is somebody with a good memory and vocabulary. Not much more is needed. There is no real strategy since you don't know what letters the other player has or his allowable moves to develop blocking strategies like in chess.

Memory is just one component of IQ. Memory helps in some areas of testing but means nothing in spatial reasoning.

There is NO randomness to chess unlike scrabble. You know every possible move your opponent can make. It is all about your ability to think strategically when you get to the higher levels. That was always the flaws in the computer games until they started programming them beyond basic tactical moves. The computers could calculate more moves ahead than almost any human could and the insertion of famous openings allowed the computer to see what strategy the human might be playing and counter it.

There was that famous instance where a computer in one of those tests moved a piece to a space and then on the next move put it back where it was originally. This was because the algorithm was mainly tactical - it calculated the best move from it's search tree but it had no overall strategy on how it was going to play the game before it started.

The problem with inducing randomness to a game is that it can fool people into thinking something is happening that really isn't. You see this all the time in those poker tournaments. Yes, the professionals seem to win more often than not, but you can't really say why someone won. Was he better at money management, was he a better bluffer, did he read tells better, Did he understand the probabilities of making a hand better than others, or did he just get the right cards at the right time?

The taboo on IQ studies means that the few academics who are willing engage with the subject are often not the smartest of cookies.

Anyhow, this must be the 3rd or 4th such article on Unz.com and nobody, above or below the line, has come up with a plausible explanation.

Karlin will make his point about Japanese and Chinese playing Go rather than chess.

But, as for explaining how a population of 2 million with a mean IQ of 64 produces world class scrabble players - zilch.

Very true – I’d add, having spend some time in Sub Saharan Africa that a substantially greater proportion of the population lack decent AC and time for pass-times such as scrabble. Also there is no real money or status attached to success. Also, given that they would compete in either English or French much of the population would lack the vocabulary in their second language.

I’ve known too many bright, highly academic West African families – across 3 generations so not the statistical outlier – to believe the simplistic SS African IQ score. I’d love to read some research about Igbos who seem over-represented in any mathematical type job they can aim for.

Indeed it is unfortunate that this, by far the best of CC's articles that I have read starts with that absurd figure of 70 - absurd anyway if it is intended to portray just what you would expect of an average of 70 for a group of contemporary NW Europeans. It seems likely that the there are castes and other subpopulations that make the distribution of g not totally unlike that in India at least if one has any taste for accepting Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs & Steel" thesis for why Eurasians got ahead. (If only those cuassed zebras had taken to being harnessed!).

Also plausible I suggest is the notion that superior performance at Scrabble need have little to do with g but about Aspergerish or Idiot Savant qualities that tend to be male and might be just as prevalent in Africa as elsewhere.

There remains to be examined the a priori probability that there were pro g mutations in the difficult conditions of Ice Age Eurasia that, even if they or comparable ones occurred in Africa, weren't matched for selective advantage in Africa. (And I seem to remember reading about one which seems to have occurred about 20,000 year s ago in Eurasia. We know that there are such major differences as no Neanderthal genes in Africa so it would be best not to be too dogmatic until much more empirical research into African genomes is available. Do we have any idea how much Eurasian DNA might be found in the very black peoples of NE Africa?)

"Still it took over 100 years after emancipation of Jews for Jews to produce mainstream writers in Germany and Europe in general."

That is a painfully ignorant statement.

Moses Mendelssohn was born in 1729, before any serious moves at Emancipation. I think he had to sneak into Berlin under false pretenses in order to study (being Jewish). Heinrich Heine was born in 1797, right as Emancipation was getting under way. Marx was born only twenty years later. All three are self-evident in their "mainstream" importance to philosophy, literature, and economics respectively.

Nor were they alone. A deeper survey shows German Jews produced several important writers in 19th century Germany, despite being 1% of the populace:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_literature#German_Jewish_literature

In general, Jews started contributing to German and European high culture almost immediately after emancipation, whether legal strictures or the self-imposed limitations of religious orthodoxy.

Perhaps rather than name-calling ("fundamentalists" "boring" "unimaginative") in the future, you could critique your own claims with readily-available evidence?

This is a bit more complicated – most German “Jews” who achieved high prominence had been Christian converts (or descendants of converts). What is puzzling here is not debate on IQ- it’s murky, how can one assess intelligence of Hegel or Fichte, since these activities are muddled per definitionem ?-, but the fact that emancipated German Jews so quickly embraced high German/European culture, having actually booted their own ethno-religious culture they’d so tenaciously clung for centuries.

True, there were significant German Jewish writers in the first half of the 19th C (Heine, Boerne,..), but they somehow waned in the 2nd half & emerged in the first half of the 20th C. Perhaps more interesting are exact sciences: as far as I recall, only Carl Jacobi achieved prominence & Eisenstein’s premature death left his status as a mathematician opened.

But it is possible that talents follow Čiževskij-Ertel hypothesis on inter-relation of Sun activity & genius; also, this hypothesis, elaborated in Eysenck’s book: “Genius”, poses that gifted individuals will follow this order- first poetry, then visual arts, then literature, and finally philosophy & sciences.

But this is an aside. “g” in IQ measurement definitely works for numerous areas; just, I am not convinced it covers creativity as well (I mean high creativity); evidently, high IQ does not have anything to do with highest levels of creativity in many fields (Beethoven couldn’t learn how to multiply; I also doubt that Michelangelo, or Plato, for that matter, would be proud members of Mensa); also, its ahistoricity cannot explain blossoming of highest levels of achievement in a short span of time in small cities (Galileo, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Machiavelli … Florentine contemporaries or near-contemporaries)

I liked your illustration with wolf-dog analogy but I doubt that Blacks would like it. Anyway, a dog doesn't have any extra special genes that wolf would not have. But it is lacking genes (responsible for independence and aggressiveness) that prevent wolf from behaving and learning like a dog. Still a wolf can solve some problems independently that a dog cannot. When confronted with a difficult problem a dog seek a human for a help. Dog is more social. Civilization, culture are social. And intelligence are part of it. It can't exist apart for culture.

I don’t think every dog when challenged by problem will find a human to help it. We have a lot of dogs who try to solve problems by themselves. My analogy is for “capacity to learn new things and follow rules of authorities”. Blacks are on avg less prone for both. We are really talking about domestication levels when we compare human races. And IQ tests seems part of this human training to adapt and to cooperate in big societies even because they has been selected to learn better and faster this skills and to obey the authorities. And domestication have increased human capacity to learn new things and to be more pro social. I’m not saying blacks ARE like wolf than dog because all human populations are more or less “self” domesticated but that blacks are less domesticated than east Asians and whites, little more wolf ( the same for Jews). And I believe the trends to precocious maturation in behavior and body/organism among blacks is a good possible evidence for that because in nature living beings who develop faster or predominantly during its gestation tend to be more instinctive than those who born less “developed”. This hiatus between birth and final biological maturation not just increase human plasticity to learn new things but also reflects how longer is the time to the brain fully develop.

I also use this analogy to show that IQ tests for more instinctive and “less” instinctive human beings is like we have a set of commands to the dog being applied for wolves. Seems obvious that they will be worse than the dog.

Instinctives are more practical’s and less abstract in their evolutionary strategies.

But is the African environment cognitively "deficient" or cognitively "different"? Might not a test of cognitive capacity devised to assess performance that is adaptive in a typical African social and physical milieu reveal cognitive "deficiency" of the Western environment?

IQ is basically the application of internalized/memorized abstract knowledges to solve problems or answer questions instead the virgin or pure analysis, you need access your crystallized knowledge to solve them or to answer questions.

Other feature of instinct is the lack of interest in non-objective/evolutionary stuff (usually can be useful but in indirect ways). Wolves just can survive. This why many people say blacks are on avg more street-smart than other groups.

So if you are exceptionally good at Tetris or Scrabble you must have a high g, even though your IQ may be, frankly, embarrassingly low, like an African’s, in fact.

NO.

It's like if there was "F" for fitness general factor. OK, the analogy is stupid, but maybe it will help you understand.

So for every physical activity there would be correlation. People with higher "F" would be better at sports overall.

However, there would be also subscores "R" for running and "U" for upper body strength. Of course,
people high of "F" would be, on average, having also high "R" and "U" scores.

Then you would have specific abilities "S" for soccer "T" for tennis and so on.

Now, for any population varying on some ability, say "soccer", part of the variance would be explained by "F". Then part of the remainder by "R", and the remainder by specific "S".

Here, imagine this Tetris thing. Now, people with better quality nervous system would have faster reaction times and so on. So "g" would explain part of the variance. Then you would have some more specific abilities, like "mental rotation", and finally, some specific abilities related to Tetris + expertise.

Now, having high scores in Tetris would not mean high "g" scores. However, you would find some weak correlation between "g" and Tetris scores. I presume very weak. Hence, you could have high "Tetris" score despite having quite average "g" and therefore, also "IQ".

Here, I (and independently others too) postulate that the scrabble puzzle is solved by:
(1) Average IQ much higher than 64 + maybe different SD, and less normal distribution (more fat tail per res and Bill)
(2) weak correlation between "g" and scrabble
(3) existence of specific mental abilities, on which the gap between whites-blacks may be lower than on some others (I've linked a page showing that the gaps are in fact lower on some specific mental abilities, so why not here too?)
(4) higher role of expertise (i.e. how much do you train)

Now I will be just speculating, generating the ideas.

That would mean that, for example, on average people with IQ 115 would have higher chances to be top players than people with IQ of 70, but there would not be discernible difference between 115 and 120. Or maybe some minimal IQ is required, after each there are diminishing returns for having more points: i.e. for compensate for difference between 75 and 115 no amount of training could be possible, for compensate between 100 and 115 5 hours more training would be required, for compensate for a difference between 115 and 130 1 hour more training would be required...

Or maybe you need some specific ability, on which there is no difference between whites-blacks - again, some minimal IQ would be needed, but over that, the differences in that specific ability would matter more (i.e. while you have minimum IQ of say 100, differences in specific ability matters more).

Now, note that all I wrote is perfectly compatible with standard hierarchical model of intelligence (with its standard divisions into Gf and Gc, visuospatial abilities vs verbal etc). Hence saying that you are building strawman by saying that somehow "IQ cultist" think "g" can explain everything.

It’s like if there was “F” for fitness general factor. OK, the analogy is stupid, but maybe it will help you understand.

There you go again. The IQ-ist put-down, you have a comprehension deficit!

But as a physiologist, I don’t find the fitness analogy stupid at all. Indeed, I have even suggested several physiological causes of variation in g. See my g is for glutamate, for example. Or a defect or low gain in the GABA-ergic transduction pathway, that seems to play a role in autism, could be another of many factors affecting mental performance.

Further, I don’t disagree with much of what you say. But when you say:

That would mean that, for example, on average people with IQ 115 would have higher chances to be top players than people with IQ of 70, but there would not be discernible difference between 115 and 120.

you are talking in vague generalizations only. In specific cases you are spectacularly wrong, e.g., the cases of the three winner of the Nobel Prize in physics that I have already mentioned, and the people who win commercially profitable patents, earn a PhD at 22, hold academic appointments, run successful companies, without necessarily having an exceptional IQ.

Moreover it seems you fail to realize how radically your generalization is refuted in some cases, e.g., the musical genius of Derek Paravicini (IQ less than 35), or the compulsive obsessive genius of not only Feynman, but of Einstein, who spend much time imagining what it would be like to travel with a ray of light, or Jacques Monod, who thought deeply about the conformational transformation of proteins acting as enzyme catalysts.

In general, it seems to me that the obsession with IQ as a determining factor in individual and national success is just about as unsound as Nazi ideology about the superiority of the Nordic type. IQ is a highly culture-loaded measure, and the assumption that you can compare these kids, with these kids by means of an IQ test seems to me totally daft.

Now if you had some physiological measures, that differentiated among racial groups, I’d be more interested.

In the meantime, those stupid Africans are multiplying like crazy, going from 0.9 billion in 2010 to 2.0 billion in 2o50, while those brilliant Americans, Europeans, Askenazi Jews, etc. fail to achieve even a replacement fertility. Whoever may be the dopes here, it is obvious who has the superior Darwinian fitness.

Anyhow, while these might have once been factors, they have ceased to be of any import. There are huge openings databases on sites like Chess Tempo. The information content there is probably an order of magnitude larger than in the entirety of the Soviet chess literature. You can play online, or download a free chess engine like Stockfish that is about 2 S.D. better than the top grandmaster. Virtually all of the classic literature on chess is floating around in PDF format. Lots of the software is free, and much of what isn’t, can be pirated (which of course can be done completely without risk in Africa).

And before you make the obvious rejoinder, the Africans do now have Internet access – Nigeria, S. Africa, and Kenya are at 50%, even Ethiopia is at above 10%.

At least Chanda seems to have stopped using "the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces" to explain African underperformance. That is progress.

Once again, you have failed to address the real issue.

We have a random variable whose probability function is supposedly a gaussian of mean 64 and sd 12. We would not expect large numbers of +130 or +145 instances from 2 million samples.

So *something* is wrong.

Either:

1/ world class scrabble is not very g loaded.
– Colour me sceptical. These guys need to learn a large dictionary, spot matches from the dictionary, calculate probabalities so that they can decide when to dump tiles and when and where to place them on the board. The better the calculation the better the performance. High g would seem to be a distinct advantage.

2/ The probability function of our random variable is not a gaussian of mean 64 and sd 12. Either it isn’t a mono-modal gaussian, the mean isn’t 64, the sd isn’t 12 and some or all of these must be *very substantially* wrong.

Is it possible there is some middle ground here? Intelligence may be equal once we control for environmental factors, but still differentiated (i.e., geared toward different tasks, values, and mental operations). Think of it as the biological substrate of Spengler’s ‘soul’. Another consideration is that mental intelligence cannot be separated from our corporeal existence, as a number of philosophers have demonstrated. This may explain why African mating patterns endure in American blacks. The integrity of the black family has declined since the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution; whites no longer enforces their standards of monogamy. Why do we see this regression to the mean? Are we supposed to believe that because Tyrone has been born into a less advantaged situation, that means he has no agency to avoid having 5 kids with 5 different hoes? Even leftists allow the situation for blacks have improved since the Civil Rights protests. If so, why haven’t blacks seen a corresponding increase in their social and familial integrity, which has actually got worse than in the days of ‘oppression’? Because pair bonding is a mating strategy that never worked in the African environment, and as such never resulted in a selection of an impulse toward monogamy. HBD spergs then try to argue this is a result of low IQ. However, sex is an arational activity. Whites, like others, have sex because it feels good, not because they thought about it long and hard and concluded it was ‘the right thing to do’. However, in whites there is a tendency to enjoy sex more when coupled with an emotional component – pair bonding. Tyone enjoys sex more when he tapping a series of asses – he likes to keep things fresh and exciting. We can hardly blame Tyrone for following his impulses when we do exactly the same. Really, blacks need to evolve polyamorous institutions and social conventions backed up by the state which compliment their natural inclinations, just as our mechanisms did before the sexual revolution.

Under this hypothesis, different groups living in the same space will always antagonize one another. In Putnam’s research, we find this included different groups of whites. (The process is exacerbated by the fact culture is transmitted according to biological bonds.) Jews are a good example. For whatever reasons (cultural priority, cognitive friendly environment, genes, Jews who have got smart using nepotistic networks to induct average Jew into the cognitive elite), Jews aren’t dumb. But when politically correct mores are stripped away, they are often reviled. As Evola said, Europeans found something about the Jewish culture and behavoural habits deeply revolting. And judging by ongoing Jewish attempts to deconstruct traditional European culture, they feel the same way about us.

Whatever the outcome of the HBD ‘debate’, the liberal vision of an individuated humanity leveled before the alters of tolerance and equality, has always been a ludicrous proposition. People want to form and belong to distinct, coherent groups that depend upon particularity and discrimination in order to generate hierarchies of meaning necessary for a qualitative existence. ‘Tolerance’ is a codeword for the reduction of everybody to mechanistic, fungible units.

For whatever reasons (cultural priority, cognitive friendly environment, genes, Jews who have got smart using nepotistic networks to induct average Jew into the cognitive elite), Jews aren’t dumb. But when politically correct mores are stripped away, they are often reviled. As Evola said, Europeans found something about the Jewish culture and behavoural habits deeply revolting. And judging by ongoing Jewish attempts to deconstruct traditional European culture, they feel the same way about us.

It's not that simple. "Jews" from your example are Middle-Eastern aliens- this was European perception of them, shared by assimilated German-American Jews who commented on mass Jewish immigration at the turn of the century: "Jews are an Asiatic horde".-while assimilated Jews are, socio-culturally, not too different from your Joe Six-pack. What fuels antisemitism is behavior of some percentage of Jews who try to subvert dominant cultural norms & act as inimical aliens. But- they're in the minority, I'd say 10-15% of them. And then all Jews pay the price for transgressions & mischievous behavior of their (former) co-religionists.

There is NO randomness to chess unlike scrabble. You know every possible move your opponent can make. It is all about your ability to think strategically when you get to the higher levels. That was always the flaws in the computer games until they started programming them beyond basic tactical moves. The computers could calculate more moves ahead than almost any human could and the insertion of famous openings allowed the computer to see what strategy the human might be playing and counter it.

There was that famous instance where a computer in one of those tests moved a piece to a space and then on the next move put it back where it was originally. This was because the algorithm was mainly tactical – it calculated the best move from it’s search tree but it had no overall strategy on how it was going to play the game before it started.

The problem with inducing randomness to a game is that it can fool people into thinking something is happening that really isn’t. You see this all the time in those poker tournaments. Yes, the professionals seem to win more often than not, but you can’t really say why someone won. Was he better at money management, was he a better bluffer, did he read tells better, Did he understand the probabilities of making a hand better than others, or did he just get the right cards at the right time?

Oh, lovely. A ‘Jews as parasites’ metaphor in response to my simply noting the contributions of Jews to the arts and sciences in the West from our Emancipation forward.

…and someone was complaining above about this wholly legitimate and unresolved issue of possible genetic bases in group intelligence differences between historical human populations as the greatest “blight” on UNZ.

Is it possible there is some middle ground here? Intelligence may be equal once we control for environmental factors, but still differentiated (i.e., geared toward different tasks, values, and mental operations). Think of it as the biological substrate of Spengler's 'soul'. Another consideration is that mental intelligence cannot be separated from our corporeal existence, as a number of philosophers have demonstrated. This may explain why African mating patterns endure in American blacks. The integrity of the black family has declined since the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution; whites no longer enforces their standards of monogamy. Why do we see this regression to the mean? Are we supposed to believe that because Tyrone has been born into a less advantaged situation, that means he has no agency to avoid having 5 kids with 5 different hoes? Even leftists allow the situation for blacks have improved since the Civil Rights protests. If so, why haven't blacks seen a corresponding increase in their social and familial integrity, which has actually got worse than in the days of 'oppression'? Because pair bonding is a mating strategy that never worked in the African environment, and as such never resulted in a selection of an impulse toward monogamy. HBD spergs then try to argue this is a result of low IQ. However, sex is an arational activity. Whites, like others, have sex because it feels good, not because they thought about it long and hard and concluded it was 'the right thing to do'. However, in whites there is a tendency to enjoy sex more when coupled with an emotional component - pair bonding. Tyone enjoys sex more when he tapping a series of asses - he likes to keep things fresh and exciting. We can hardly blame Tyrone for following his impulses when we do exactly the same. Really, blacks need to evolve polyamorous institutions and social conventions backed up by the state which compliment their natural inclinations, just as our mechanisms did before the sexual revolution.

Under this hypothesis, different groups living in the same space will always antagonize one another. In Putnam's research, we find this included different groups of whites. (The process is exacerbated by the fact culture is transmitted according to biological bonds.) Jews are a good example. For whatever reasons (cultural priority, cognitive friendly environment, genes, Jews who have got smart using nepotistic networks to induct average Jew into the cognitive elite), Jews aren't dumb. But when politically correct mores are stripped away, they are often reviled. As Evola said, Europeans found something about the Jewish culture and behavoural habits deeply revolting. And judging by ongoing Jewish attempts to deconstruct traditional European culture, they feel the same way about us.

Whatever the outcome of the HBD 'debate', the liberal vision of an individuated humanity leveled before the alters of tolerance and equality, has always been a ludicrous proposition. People want to form and belong to distinct, coherent groups that depend upon particularity and discrimination in order to generate hierarchies of meaning necessary for a qualitative existence. 'Tolerance' is a codeword for the reduction of everybody to mechanistic, fungible units.

For whatever reasons (cultural priority, cognitive friendly environment, genes, Jews who have got smart using nepotistic networks to induct average Jew into the cognitive elite), Jews aren’t dumb. But when politically correct mores are stripped away, they are often reviled. As Evola said, Europeans found something about the Jewish culture and behavoural habits deeply revolting. And judging by ongoing Jewish attempts to deconstruct traditional European culture, they feel the same way about us.

It’s not that simple. “Jews” from your example are Middle-Eastern aliens- this was European perception of them, shared by assimilated German-American Jews who commented on mass Jewish immigration at the turn of the century: “Jews are an Asiatic horde”.-while assimilated Jews are, socio-culturally, not too different from your Joe Six-pack. What fuels antisemitism is behavior of some percentage of Jews who try to subvert dominant cultural norms & act as inimical aliens. But- they’re in the minority, I’d say 10-15% of them. And then all Jews pay the price for transgressions & mischievous behavior of their (former) co-religionists.

Since society today has moved closer to modern Jewish norms, the gap between Jews and some Europeans has narrowed. Yet your claim its just 10-15% of troublemakers is still absurd. Most Jews vote with the coalition of the fringe (against Anglo-Protestant America) that is the Democratic Party. The ones who don't are hardcore Zionists. I would say the 10-15% figure represents the proportion of Jews with access to real cultural power. Every Jew who becomes elite supports the liberal global agenda. Most Jews are thus responsible because they form the ground of enculturation for their elites.

The very fact they still identity as 'Jews' speaks to their distinct identity. They hide under the WWII propaganda of 'Judaeo-Christian' values as if they are the same. Take that away and they're no different to Muslims, only sharper, more resentful, and more practiced at subversion.

I would say the lowest IQ estimation for SSA are untenable. However, Wicherts et al once estimated African IQ to be much higher, in range of American Blacks (lower 80s). Taking that into account, and allowing for SD higher than 12 would allow theoretically for Gabon players (if scrabble would be national sport played pretty much by everyone, from the kids on the streets to the elders on their deathbeds).

However, the fact that average top scrabble players in Europe or America may have IQ of 140 does not mean one need IQ of 140 to be a top player; in chess, IIRC, correlation between IQ and chess ability goes down with top players. In one study (quoted by Grabner et al) expert chess players (ELO up to 2400, ie Kenny Solomon is within that range) had average 115 in IQ subscales, while mere 106 in overal general intelligence. Grabner found that the highest intelligence of top chess player was 144 and, in contrast, he found significant correlation, with "g" explaining something like one third of the variance in ELO rating. That means that not every GM chess player has to have 140 IQ. In other study however, Bilalic McLeod 2010, the correlation between IQ and skill disappeared amongst the top players (with average IQ in range of 130s) - though the size of the sample was very small.

"When an elite subsample of 23 children was tested, it turned out that intelligence was not a significant factor in chess skill, and that, if anything, it tended to correlate negatively with chess skill."

As scrabble requires intelligence, but also a lot of memorizing, it means it may tap more on some sub-scale of general intelligence AND that's why I think the assumption that top players HAVE to be 140 is unguaranteed (in general). After all, it were the American players which were tested, not the African ones.

With threshold 130, and Wicherts higher IQ estimation, you can get 1 in ten thousand top players even with SD 12.

One have to wonder, however: what if there are african subpopulations with IQ significantly higher than neighbouring population, similarly to Jewish Ashkenazis? That still would mean the lowest estimations of IQ in places like Gabon are way too low, but if there would be say a small population like 10% of Gabon's population, it would effectively almost double the number of potential players.

I will repeat myself, however: with plenty of evidence pointing in one direction, and one or two (though very good) pieces of evidence pointing into the other direction, you have to be forgiving that people are not immedietely convinced.

I’ll take a closer look at your other points and posts later, but for now you’ll have to explain for me your logic in this statement, which you apparently need to be true:

However, the fact that average top scrabble players in Europe or America may have IQ of 140 does not mean one need IQ of 140 to be a top player

This is only true if there is no connection between their being “top Scrabble players” and having that IQ of 140.

If within Europe or America, a lower IQ person has a disadvantage against the 140 IQ players, can you explain to me exactly how he would not have that same disadvantage just because he happens to have migrated from Africa? (That’s exactly what you’re saying.) And whatever answer you give (I can’t begin to imagine what that is), can you also explain why this strange African exceptionality does not seem to apply to native black Americans?

You’re on the verge of suggesting that Africans need something other than intelligence to achieve what requires intelligence among other groups. I’m sure you can see the contradictions inherent in that suggestion.

No - my point was not that Scrabble requires intelligence in whites, but something else in Africans.

First of all, it does not seem like all top Scrabble players have IQ of 140, only that some have.

My hypothesis was much less controversial and it consists of three points

(1) Hypothetical differences in gaps

We know that the gaps on different cognitive abilities differ not just between whites and blacks, but also whites and east asians.

Hence, I speculated that maybe there is a set of abilities helpful with playing scrabble, let's call them "Sc", for example large working memory (and we know that when matched for IQ, american blacks have better working memory), quick numerical addition, some visual reasoning and so on. The "Sc" may be highly correlated with some math abilities - but "correlation" would not mean that there will be no people high on hypothetical "Sc", yet lacking other math skills.

"Sc" will be obviously "g" loaded. The question is then, will the g-loading be the same in whites and blacks?

What if to get the same score on hypothetical "Sc" one would have to get 115 in whites, but only 100 in blacks?

(2) Higher IQ scoresGabon can not have IQ score of 64 or even of 70. I speculate it must have higher score, in lower 80s. Obviously, Gabon would have to have higher IQ even with a model I proposed in previous installments of "scrabble oddyssey", where there would be a subpopulation with substantially higher average IQ than the general population. In fact, if the scrabble would indeed require IQ of 140, the size and/or average IQ of the postulated subpopulation would have to be big enough to raise average IQ of Gabon substantially, which is why previously I was against this hypothesis (Johan Meyer tries to save this hypothesis by saying "elites do not participate in the studies of IQ" which i find unlikely - note that at 140IQ threshold in his hypothesis there would be something like 3000 people potentially eligible to be top players without correcting for age).

(3) Expertise role Imagine that you can defeat some intelligence differences by experience and diminishing returns from higher intelligence (non-linear relation between IQ and ability to play scrabble).

That is, say that (pure speculation, of course) there is no way, realistically, one can defeat a difference between 70IQ and 140IQ. However, let's say that to defeat 115IQ, a person with 100IQ would have to train 5 hours per day more; while to defeat 130IQ, a person with 115IQ would have to train only 2 hours per day more and so on.

Yes, Europeans also could have train more, but the question is: what if Scrabble is more important to African players and Europeans, who have propensity to train the same number of hours, decide to invest their times in different games? What if at some level of play, once you pass minimal IQ threshold (or minimal "Sc" threshold), all that counts is the number of hours you train?

That is: say european with IQ140 finds out he can beat local scrabble competition with little training; so initially, at no-professional level, only IQ counts. Then he finds out that at some level IQ alone is not enough, starts training when starting facing really tough competition, at the professional level - where only level of hours count.

That would explain neatly even the scenario when Europeans players would have IQ high, while African not so; and that explanation would not even requires postulating that Africans are using different set of skills to achieve exactly the same what is achieved by European players by intelligence.

Per gender gap: there are differences in brain structure between females/males, and - as you surely know - there are differences on different subtests of cognitive abilities between males and females. Hence, if Scrabble calls for some specific subset of coginitive abilities, it may call on abilities where gender gap is larger than on "g". Even postulating "100" score for girls with smaller variation, and "105" for boys on that specific subset of hypothetical abilities, and a very modest "105" score for "being top player", you can calculate that there will be 5 boys for 3.6 girls. Since I don't know what "domination" of boys means, I cannot comment further.

To summarise: I agree you posted a valid problem which has to be explained. But I am not fully convinced the problem means we should ditch all the other evidence. I am also aware that I am speculating, but then - I do not feel ONE or two pieces of evidence pointing in one direction should be more important than a lot of evidence pointing in another direction.

However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

I think szopen's statement is an excellent point and goes a long way to explaining the sex differences at high levels. Especially given that in my experience women are if anything overrepresented in casual Scrabble play (especially if you compare to something like chess!) and are quite competitive at that level (which I tend to attribute to verbal facility). One question that goes along with that observation is how different is casual from competitive Scrabble? I think a fair bit (e.g. extensive focused memorization of key word lists, possibly verbal vs. spatial importance?), and if the differences favor males in competitive Scrabble that would be another partial explanation.

This need for practice ties in with one of Chanda's points:

There should still (statistically) be no single person from African countries like Gabon. And yet they exist, constantly outperforming math professors and computer scientists from the developed world.

Competing at the top levels in Scrabble (I believe) requires extensive practice time over years. There is a comparative advantage argument here that people who have better things to do with their time (or stated more charitably, time consuming primary/other activities) are less likely to excel at Scrabble even given comparable potential.

The obvious follow on question is: can we support this hypothesis? I don't think we have data to do so, but let me sketch some thoughts.

1. Tendency of potential elite Scrabble players to have other things to do professionally.
2. Tendency of potential elite Scrabble players to choose Scrabble as their preferred recreation.

Question 1. could be answered empirically somewhat. How do the professional backgrounds and practice regimens of elite non/African Scrabble players compare?

Question 2. can also be answered empirically. How do the Scrabble/chess/etc. pipelines compare in the different countries?

Back to comparative advantage, I think it would help to look at the reasons people choose to play elite Scrabble vs. other activities. One last partial explanation would be if the stereotypical extemporaneous verbal facility of blacks translates to Scrabble providing both increased ability and incentive to choose this activity.

Overall I like thinking about this problem as a series of filters acting on the Scrabble ability (with IQ only being a partial proxy, this becomes important if the other ability probability distributions are less tilted against, or even favor, Africans) probability distribution. Here's a proposal for a Scrabble player profile with filters (of course the "thresholds" are soft).

Any thoughts on the validity/utility of this train of thought? How about the impact of the other requirements on the representation of African players at the elite levels of Scrabble?

This comment does not have much rigor or any data, but hopefully it offers some food for thought. I think there are testable hypotheses embedded here (e.g. population distributions in Scrabble "pipeline", different game prevalence in different cultures) if we only had data.

Szopen: However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

I think szopen’s statement is an excellent point and goes a long way to explaining the sex differences at high levels.

No.

Szopen forgets a point I keep repeating: the gender disparity in Scrabble championship begins *before* that professional adult level (where many hours are spent per day): it is there quite early in high school. The top Scrabble finalists are almost always boys, even with high female participation.

These scrabble articles remind me of a chapter in Alice in Wonderland.

53 years ago I knew an African student who was in Stanford's aeronautical engineering program. Therefore all Africans are capable of being Stanford
AEs. What everyone else in the program wondered what he would do when he got home. There were no aircraft factories in I think it was Nigeria. Better if Africans learned to be pilots and mechanics.

Little did we naive baby boomers know that TPTB intended to replace us and our children with HI B visa holders.

But that one guy is positive proof that all Africans have high enough IQs to be Stanford engineers

But that one guy is positive proof that all Africans have high enough IQs to be Stanford engineers

Except that nobody was making this argument. It’s just a dishonest straw man.

Oh, lovely. A 'Jews as parasites' metaphor in response to my simply noting the contributions of Jews to the arts and sciences in the West from our Emancipation forward.

...and someone was complaining above about this wholly legitimate and unresolved issue of possible genetic bases in group intelligence differences between historical human populations as the greatest "blight" on UNZ.

Parasites are masters on the liar game ^_~

You are anjools on earth, thank you god!!

Always unfairly persecuted!! Why??

Such ignorant unpleasant”goy”!$!

The light of enlightenment, the partisans of the kindness!! The knights of social justice!!!

As Evola said, Europeans found something about the Jewish culture and behavoural habits deeply revolting. And judging by ongoing Jewish attempts to deconstruct traditional European culture, they feel the same way about us.

Judaism was so “revolting” that Europeans abandoned their indigenous beliefs to embrace a Jewish prophet, whose story rests on Jewish religious works. The only really revolting aspect of Judaism that differs markedly from Christian practice markedly is circumcision, an act of barbarism that my fellow Jews should have left in the cultural gutter during the Helenistic era.

Jews just served an out-group vilification that was one of convenient proximity, not our intrinsic ‘evil’ as a people.

Contrary to your lurid claim, the civilizational suicide machine in France, Sweden, Britain, Germany, and so forth are not Jewish-led or Jewish-dominated. The United States is the only nation in the West where a good faith critique of Jewish influence can be made.

If anything Jews are some of wariest Europeans when it comes to being “enriched” by the overpopulation spilling out of the Muslim world.

Plenty of blame to go around for sure. It is obviously ridiculous to blame the Jews for the suicidal tendencies of far too many white people. All one has to do is talk with a brain dead white liberal to know you are dealing with a form of madness.

But Jewish control of the media throughout the West has certainly played an outsized role in leading the goyim to pursue civilizational suicide. The goyim have to develop an immunity to the siren song of cultural destruction coming from the Jewish pied pipers, before the suicide march is halted.

The idea that there can be a definition of IQ that crosses cultural boundaries is obviously untrue, because we don’t have one that allows us to compare ourselves with our grandparents.

If we take our grandparent’s IQ tests, our average intelligence people are 2 sds above them, 130 near genius. If they took ours, they would be on the edge of severely retarded, IQ 70.

Flynn the Flynn Effect :

Your IQ is very strongly influenced by the amount and abstraction levels of the flows of information in your culture. That may or may not be related to how well you play chess and live life, but it surely controls what kinds of problems you do easily on an IQ test.

This whole discussion is based on the idea that there is a meaningful comparison of IQs across cultures and ethnic groups. BS, we can’t do it even with our parents and grandparents.

When we have a physiological measure of the excellence of a brain’s performance, we may be able to compare races, but actual performance at any task will continue to be influenced by many other factors in addition to the physiology, itself influenced by the genetics but not wholly determined by it.

This is a dumb thing to be focused on, a meaningless question based on dumb assumptions that can’t be solved with any possible evidence.

Instead, we need to grasp what every race contributes uniquely to the total human genome, what special properties of mind and body they produce, e.g. the Australian aborigines perfect sense of place and direction, and do the breeding experiments to produce better hybrids. For example, spatial reasoning is a strong component of IQ and of mathematical ability. If I were breeding for mathematical ability, I would surely try some Abo genes in the mix.

That is the way to improve our race, not trying to be pure anything. Pure strains of plants and animals are monocultures, highly productive when the conditions are perfect, but high risk for pandemics and needing a lot of inputs to keep them healthy. And the way you get better species and strains is cross-breeding and selecting, exactly as people have been doing since we were a species, from the DNA evidence from old bones.

Humans are a very inbred species by the standards of any close relative of ape or crops, or farm animals, … In all of those domestic cases, breeders search for more wild strains to add new disease resistances and other attributes to their stocks. Ruling out entire sections of humanity based on bogus arguments is idiocy.

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

With regard to reaction times, Jensen found that, when the task was completely unrelated to g, black and white times converged, but as the g-loading of the task was increased, the black-white difference became more and more pronounced.

Note also a backwards digits test: when asked to recite a series of digits in reverse order, blacks cannot recite as long a series as whites (or East Asians), on average.

For whatever reasons (cultural priority, cognitive friendly environment, genes, Jews who have got smart using nepotistic networks to induct average Jew into the cognitive elite), Jews aren’t dumb. But when politically correct mores are stripped away, they are often reviled. As Evola said, Europeans found something about the Jewish culture and behavoural habits deeply revolting. And judging by ongoing Jewish attempts to deconstruct traditional European culture, they feel the same way about us.

It's not that simple. "Jews" from your example are Middle-Eastern aliens- this was European perception of them, shared by assimilated German-American Jews who commented on mass Jewish immigration at the turn of the century: "Jews are an Asiatic horde".-while assimilated Jews are, socio-culturally, not too different from your Joe Six-pack. What fuels antisemitism is behavior of some percentage of Jews who try to subvert dominant cultural norms & act as inimical aliens. But- they're in the minority, I'd say 10-15% of them. And then all Jews pay the price for transgressions & mischievous behavior of their (former) co-religionists.

80% of vociferous liberal “or’ democrats Jews tell us that this subverts don’t seems a tiny minority. Seems there are some things Jews only talk with themselves and never with the goy.

I'm not sure I understand your question. I don't believe they err anywhere. The error lies in the extrapolations that are not suggested by the experiments themselves. Environmentalists are wrong to deny the strong significance of genes (particularly in explaining IQ variance within the same country), and hereditarians are wrong to underestimate environmental contribution to IQ differences between different countries that basically live in different centuries.

So, I will have a complete change of mind about all this if there is an "experiment" of sets of twins separated at birth or early childhood, with one set brought up in an average European environment and another set brought up in average African environment, if such twins will not score at least 2 SDs apart on scholastic or IQ tests of any kind.

Obviously! Otherwise, the IQ-ist theory is refuted. An admirable demonstration, may I say, of how to derive a premise from a desired conclusion.

Let me ask you a question. If an adult IQ test result (such as a WAIS test) were discovered, would you expect that it would substantiate the 124 IQ or be much higher? Or would you truly have no expectation?

Consider the kinds of abilities tested on the WAIS: verbal comprehension, spatio-visual ability, and concentration. Is there any question that Feynman was very well-endowed with all? His books are cogently written, his theories require spatial visualization, etc. Are you truly agnostic about whether Feynman has these abilities, that he can’t define easy words, see similarities, and solve visual puzzles?

Let me ask you a question. If an adult IQ test result (such as a WAIS test) were discovered, would you expect that it would substantiate the 124 IQ or be much higher? Or would you truly have no expectation?

In a similar vein, for the case of Luis Alvarez there actually is an adult IQ test in archives (not publicly available though, but requestable). See http://www.amphilsoc.org/collections/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.R621-ead.xml
Anne Roe's book The Making of a Scientist looks at the IQs of top rank scientists.

Cultures are different, and those difference impact their behaviour. After the Civil War, Lincoln said he believed the slaves’ culture was so different from Americans’ culture that the slaves would never adequately assimilate in America, and he intended to deport all of them. James Monroe also set out to deport the slaves.

I met a farmer from South Africa who was Dutch and whose forefathers had farmed in South Africa for many years. The South African government took a portion of his farm and livestock and gave it to native people there. Those native people slaughtered all the livestock for the immediate income and left the land fallow, refusing to farm it.

There are cultural difference that should be recognized, differences that prohibit assimilation and harm a culture/society when those different outside cultures are forced onto that culture/society.

This forced integration, not assimilation, is intentional, aimed at destroying sovereign nations and high performing sovereign people.

Obviously! Otherwise, the IQ-ist theory is refuted. An admirable demonstration, may I say, of how to derive a premise from a desired conclusion.

Let me ask you a question. If an adult IQ test result (such as a WAIS test) were discovered, would you expect that it would substantiate the 124 IQ or be much higher? Or would you truly have no expectation?

Consider the kinds of abilities tested on the WAIS: verbal comprehension, spatio-visual ability, and concentration. Is there any question that Feynman was very well-endowed with all? His books are cogently written, his theories require spatial visualization, etc. Are you truly agnostic about whether Feynman has these abilities, that he can't define easy words, see similarities, and solve visual puzzles?

Consider the kinds of abilities tested on the WAIS: verbal comprehension, spatio-visual ability, and concentration. Is there any question that Feynman was very well-endowed with all? His books are cogently written, his theories require spatial visualization, etc. Are you truly agnostic about whether Feynman has these abilities, that he can’t define easy words, see similarities, and solve visual puzzles?

You don't seem very well informed about Richard Feynman. Most of his books were ghost-written including the celebrated Lectures on Physics. This is consistent with his poor grades on everything but math and physics at the time he entered graduate school at Princeton.

There is no reason to doubt that Feynman was brilliant mathematically, that he had extraordinary insight as a physicist, and that he could solve incredible difficult problems in other areas. Moreover, he was certainly both articulate and charismatic when speaking of things that interested him. Here for example, explaining what keeps a train on the track.

But all that that shows is that a person can be terrifically intelligent, as normal people understand the word "intelligent" without having a terrifically high IQ. After all, the concept of g is based on correlation among cognitive aptitudes, but the average correlation is low, with a coefficient of determination of 0.5 or less. So why should Feynman not have been brilliant in some, in fact in many, respects while yet having an IQ score no higher than 124. He was simply not an all-rounder. Musically, the best he could do was play the bongo drums; on general topics, his writing without the aid of a co-author was neither polished nor profound; and and his art work was mediocre.

I'm not sure I understand your question. I don't believe they err anywhere. The error lies in the extrapolations that are not suggested by the experiments themselves. Environmentalists are wrong to deny the strong significance of genes (particularly in explaining IQ variance within the same country), and hereditarians are wrong to underestimate environmental contribution to IQ differences between different countries that basically live in different centuries.

So, I will have a complete change of mind about all this if there is an "experiment" of sets of twins separated at birth or early childhood, with one set brought up in an average European environment and another set brought up in average African environment, if such twins will not score at least 2 SDs apart on scholastic or IQ tests of any kind.

I get the argument. It's a dumb argument. For many reasons, not the least of which is that its premise--viz., that performance at Scrabble is a more reliable indicator of the mean IQ of a population, than tests which directly measure IQ in members of that population--is so obviously and heinously flawed as to hardly need any external refutation.

Beyond that, Scrabble is a dumb game mostly enjoyed by midwits who like to fancy themselves much smarter than they actually are. The notion that performance at Scrabble should scale linearly with IQ is preposterous, and needs to be demonstrated. Chisala simply assumes facts not in evidence, wildly extrapolating from garbage social "science" papers (Toma et al. 2014, the one she referenced about the IQ of "elite" Scrabble players, used a grand total of n = 26 Scrabble players). This amounts to assuming her conclusion.

That national rates of Scrabble-champion production is being promoted as reliable evidence of national mean IQ, by the same people who decry standard g-loaded IQ tests as "culturally biased," practically beggars belief. Or rather it would, if the limits of these people's analytical ability had not already been so thoroughly exposed.

It’s like if there was “F” for fitness general factor. OK, the analogy is stupid, but maybe it will help you understand.

There you go again. The IQ-ist put-down, you have a comprehension deficit!

But as a physiologist, I don't find the fitness analogy stupid at all. Indeed, I have even suggested several physiological causes of variation in g. See my g is for glutamate, for example. Or a defect or low gain in the GABA-ergic transduction pathway, that seems to play a role in autism, could be another of many factors affecting mental performance.

Further, I don't disagree with much of what you say. But when you say:

That would mean that, for example, on average people with IQ 115 would have higher chances to be top players than people with IQ of 70, but there would not be discernible difference between 115 and 120.

you are talking in vague generalizations only. In specific cases you are spectacularly wrong, e.g., the cases of the three winner of the Nobel Prize in physics that I have already mentioned, and the people who win commercially profitable patents, earn a PhD at 22, hold academic appointments, run successful companies, without necessarily having an exceptional IQ.

Moreover it seems you fail to realize how radically your generalization is refuted in some cases, e.g., the musical genius of Derek Paravicini (IQ less than 35), or the compulsive obsessive genius of not only Feynman, but of Einstein, who spend much time imagining what it would be like to travel with a ray of light, or Jacques Monod, who thought deeply about the conformational transformation of proteins acting as enzyme catalysts.

In general, it seems to me that the obsession with IQ as a determining factor in individual and national success is just about as unsound as Nazi ideology about the superiority of the Nordic type. IQ is a highly culture-loaded measure, and the assumption that you can compare these kids, with these kids by means of an IQ test seems to me totally daft.

Now if you had some physiological measures, that differentiated among racial groups, I'd be more interested.

In the meantime, those stupid Africans are multiplying like crazy, going from 0.9 billion in 2010 to 2.0 billion in 2o50, while those brilliant Americans, Europeans, Askenazi Jews, etc. fail to achieve even a replacement fertility. Whoever may be the dopes here, it is obvious who has the superior Darwinian fitness.

An enhanced Darwinian fitness only made possible by the intellectual contributions of science and technology (medicine, food, fossil fuels) given to them by the unfit whites.

An enhanced Darwinian fitness only made possible by the intellectual contributions of science and technology (medicine, food, fossil fuels) given to them by the unfit whites.

Indicating an inability of Europeans to think things through, with the result that they now face a genocidal tide of Muslim settlers intent on conquest by the womb not the sword, plus a mass of highly philoprogenitive African fleeing Muslim persecution.

What is the strategy precisely since you are limited to the letters you have and you do not know what the letters the other players have. Sure you might be able to block somebody from putting down some high valued word but you don't even know if he is capable of spelling it or if the spread of the letters is going to go off in another direction.

On the chessboard you can project the opponents allowable moves and counter-moves many steps ahead. You just don't know which one he will take or his overall strategy. As for visual reasoning, again because you are limited to a random set of letters you are more likely at the whim of chance and your superior vocabulary than any grand strategy.

IMHO these studies are like a lot of studies from social science - a lot of unprovable claims using bogus statistics.

What is the strategy precisely since you are limited to the letters you have and you do not know what the letters the other players have.

You have some knowledge of what the other player has – you know that he doesn’t have what’s already been played.

Any mental activity should be SOMEHOW correlated with IQ, but the correlation might be very weak and might not be detectable at higher levels. THose activities with low correlation or which stop to correlate after reaching some level are not good proxies of IQ (of "g", to be more correct; but I hope we all understand here that when saying "iq" we are really thinking about "g").

It's no revelation that there are many talents and "g" does not explain everything. Hence the hierarchical, most popular model for intelligence accepted by, in my impression, most people knowable in the domain I read. That is, while there might be correlation even between "g" and ability to play Tetris, at the same time there is some particular set of specific abilities which are more related to mental rotation of the objects than to some others.

This is not a mental gymnastics or dancing around the facts, but rather the description of most basic findings of psychometrics.

You’re saying psychometric G isn’t* Because real or complete G is underlying in every mental task.

As Evola said, Europeans found something about the Jewish culture and behavoural habits deeply revolting. And judging by ongoing Jewish attempts to deconstruct traditional European culture, they feel the same way about us.

Judaism was so "revolting" that Europeans abandoned their indigenous beliefs to embrace a Jewish prophet, whose story rests on Jewish religious works. The only really revolting aspect of Judaism that differs markedly from Christian practice markedly is circumcision, an act of barbarism that my fellow Jews should have left in the cultural gutter during the Helenistic era.

Jews just served an out-group vilification that was one of convenient proximity, not our intrinsic 'evil' as a people.

Contrary to your lurid claim, the civilizational suicide machine in France, Sweden, Britain, Germany, and so forth are not Jewish-led or Jewish-dominated. The United States is the only nation in the West where a good faith critique of Jewish influence can be made.

If anything Jews are some of wariest Europeans when it comes to being "enriched" by the overpopulation spilling out of the Muslim world.

Plenty of blame to go around for sure. It is obviously ridiculous to blame the Jews for the suicidal tendencies of far too many white people. All one has to do is talk with a brain dead white liberal to know you are dealing with a form of madness.

But Jewish control of the media throughout the West has certainly played an outsized role in leading the goyim to pursue civilizational suicide. The goyim have to develop an immunity to the siren song of cultural destruction coming from the Jewish pied pipers, before the suicide march is halted.

Could you explain this idea of Jewish control of the media throughout the West? I'm not sure it holds true in the UK (despite what Muslim websites may say) and certainly struggle to imagine that the German media has any notable number of Jewish leaders encouraging the madness of Merkel.

But Jewish control of the media throughout the West has certainly played an outsized role in leading the goyim to pursue civilizational suicide. The goyim have to develop an immunity to the siren song of cultural destruction coming from the Jewish pied pipers, before the suicide march is halted.

Now as a heretical Jew, I agree that the subset of Jews to whom you refer have a powerful forum for their toxic worldview. Diversity is certainly the greatest strength of plutocrats. But where is the moral agency of non-Jewish Westerners (regardless of race) in this slow suicide?

As a whole Americans had decades upon decades after the 1965 immigration bill to resist the population boom in the Global South. The 1986 amnesty for illegals should have been a wake up call. And Christians who superstitiously oppose family planning hampered NGO efforts when it was still politically feasible to aggressively demand its implementation as a condition of visas, foreign aid, etc.

Instead at every turn Americans as a whole have opted for mindless acquiescence to economic internationalist agenda, choosing the non-confrontational, materially-comfortable path over the virtuous one. That in turn opens the door for the West-hating radicals to gain influence and power.

You can define a factor "chess IQ" which is independent of g. A rough way to norm it would be to say that every 10 points of either "chess IQ" or standard IQ is worth 100 Elo rating points, with a base of Elo 1600 for chess IQ = standard IQ = 100, assuming the player made a good effort to reach his potential as a chessplayer. You can be an expert and a dummy, but practically all masters are at least average in standard intelligence, and you don't get to be a GM without being cleverer than the average person. All world champions are high in both chess IQ and standard IQ, with Steinitz, Lasker, Euwe, and Botvinnik having a greater contribution from standard IQ, while most others had a greater contribution from chess IQ. Fischer was indeed very smart although his education was poor; Kasparov is no dummy either but I'd put his chess IQ at 180 and you can do the math. (I personally have no special chess talent but reached master based on general intelligence; because chess IQ is more correlated with performance at faster time limits, I suck at blitz chess but was a senior master in correspondence play, qualifying for the U.S. championship final 7 or 8 times though I usually finished in the bottom half and never contended for the title).

The main statistical point Chisala overlooks is that when you mix populations with different means, the resulting population will not follow a normal distribution; if you renorm the test so that scores in the combined population follow percentiles appropriately, then the original subpopulations won't come out normally distributed, and if the subpopulations don't mix much, then this phenomenon will persist through the generations. Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble "anomaly" without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

The main statistical point Chisala overlooks is that when you mix populations with different means, the resulting population will not follow a normal distribution

Without even questioning your abstraction here, I should state that you are overlooking an even vigger point. These achievements are not just true about “Africa” as a unit, they are true about individual African nations (Gabon etc), including ones with too few different tribes in their populations to make your point even slightly meaningful.

Africa is more diverse genetically than the rest of the world, and there are some tribes that are really quite smart, such as the Igbo. If those tribes had a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, it would explain the Scrabble “anomaly” without hypothesizing an environmental effect large enough to depress IQ by an SD.

Firstly, as I state above, this is not just true when your unit is the combined population of “Africa”.

Secondly, if this outlier sub-population argument that keeps being made was true, then, as I — and even Cochran on the other side — have already argued, you would have seen achievements among those tribes that are similar to the intellectual achievements of at least similarly populated (small) European populations with that IQ and SD (the Igbo alone are almost 20 million in population and they don’t just aspire to be Scrabble champions!).

If you say this high IQ is only manifested in games for some strange reason, then you can’t also keep using intellectual achievement gaps between populations/races as evidence of IQ gaps (since it would mean those weird outlier African tribes have clearly strange choices for the use of their European-level IQ!). Which, in turn, would undermine your own case since that’s how you arrived here, and since it is what your hypothesis was set up to explain in the first place. Do you understand now?

You are lumping me in with many other commenters who said things I did not say, I don't have to respond to criticisms of those things.

My point is most applicable in a place like Nigeria with many different tribes. I do not have demographic data on the genetic homogeneity or inhomogeneity of Gabon as would be represented by data on the existence of subgroups that reproduce primarily with themselves rather than the rest of the country. However, an alternative that would also rebut my point is the actual distribution function of IQ in Gabon, so we could see how fat the tails are directly, relative to a normal distribution with the same mean and S.D.

My prediction is that, in the countries which greatly outperform the Scrabble performance that would be expected based on the mean and SD of the country's IQ distribution, the full IQ distribution will have much fatter tails than the normal distribution with the same mean and S.D. The full distribution is theoretically available if the mean and S.D. were calculated from an actual sample of individual IQ tests rather than by some other method; show me that my prediction is false and I will admit I was wrong.

Plenty of blame to go around for sure. It is obviously ridiculous to blame the Jews for the suicidal tendencies of far too many white people. All one has to do is talk with a brain dead white liberal to know you are dealing with a form of madness.

But Jewish control of the media throughout the West has certainly played an outsized role in leading the goyim to pursue civilizational suicide. The goyim have to develop an immunity to the siren song of cultural destruction coming from the Jewish pied pipers, before the suicide march is halted.

Could you explain this idea of Jewish control of the media throughout the West? I’m not sure it holds true in the UK (despite what Muslim websites may say) and certainly struggle to imagine that the German media has any notable number of Jewish leaders encouraging the madness of Merkel.

I imagine the most important feature of a Scrabble player is somebody with a good memory and vocabulary. Not much more is needed. There is no real strategy since you don't know what letters the other player has or his allowable moves to develop blocking strategies like in chess.

Memory is just one component of IQ. Memory helps in some areas of testing but means nothing in spatial reasoning.

Wrong. The most important feature of a Scrabble player is high level mathematical ability. The only US citizen to reach the finals of the Spanish World Scrabble Championship is Hector Klie. Klie has a PhD from Rice University in computational engineering.

Chanda discussed the math ability of Scrabble players extensively in his previous column, but his columns are too long and few people are reading them. I suggest doing a Ctrl-F for “math” in his previous column.

This is an anecdote of little value. High level mathematical ability has nothing to do with memorizing simple rules about the value of numbers and being able to add them up.

There are plenty of card counters in black jack who don't have PhDs in math. That whole 21 movie nonsense makes it seem they are doing something truly amazing but they are not. I read Ken Huston's book. He led plenty of card counting teams and none of them were from MIT or had anything of special note.

Chanda discussed the math ability of Scrabble players extensively in his previous column,

And I can make any claim I want to and throw as much pixie dust as I want to in the air with irrelevant anecdotes. This is what social "science" does regularly. The problem with this assertion is that you only need one example of an excellent Scrabble player without a serious mathematics pedigree to show it isn't true. Now do you really think everybody playing Scrabble at a high level is capable of getting a PhD in math?

Plenty of blame to go around for sure. It is obviously ridiculous to blame the Jews for the suicidal tendencies of far too many white people. All one has to do is talk with a brain dead white liberal to know you are dealing with a form of madness.

But Jewish control of the media throughout the West has certainly played an outsized role in leading the goyim to pursue civilizational suicide. The goyim have to develop an immunity to the siren song of cultural destruction coming from the Jewish pied pipers, before the suicide march is halted.

The role of oops PARASITIC Jews is not secondary as you are saying/thinking…

All the malice in the world coming from Jewish subversives would be of little or no consequence without the frank stupidity and gullibility of too many of the goyim, and the treachery of far too many of our political leaders who have sold their nation and their people out while getting in bed with the tribalist program of cultural destruction. It is these leaders, people like the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Clintons, Romney, McCain, Graham, Blair,Merkel, etc. etc. ad infinitum that are the true enemies of our civilization.

If we can be so easily manipulated and controlled by a small but powerful minority of the population, that does not say much about us, does it?

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

“60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.”

Is this the best you can do? Is it just a coincidence that blacks, on average, have the morphology and muscle fiber typing that, at the elite level, would have them excel at the game?

Today the NBA is 80 percent black. Today the NFL is 60 percent black. Today the MLB is 8 percent black and with ‘Hispanic’ blacks (islanders), they make up about 34 percent of the MLB and dominate there too. So look at what happens when there is an ‘even’ playing field in terms of nutrition and opportunities to excel in these sports.

Actually blacks are giving up on baseball and their numbers keep dropping as Latinos move in. Maybe it has a lot to do with basketball and football being instant pro or out sports and baseball is a grind through the minors unless you have the talent to be a star.

There is NO randomness to chess unlike scrabble. You know every possible move your opponent can make. It is all about your ability to think strategically when you get to the higher levels. That was always the flaws in the computer games until they started programming them beyond basic tactical moves. The computers could calculate more moves ahead than almost any human could and the insertion of famous openings allowed the computer to see what strategy the human might be playing and counter it.

There was that famous instance where a computer in one of those tests moved a piece to a space and then on the next move put it back where it was originally. This was because the algorithm was mainly tactical - it calculated the best move from it's search tree but it had no overall strategy on how it was going to play the game before it started.

The problem with inducing randomness to a game is that it can fool people into thinking something is happening that really isn't. You see this all the time in those poker tournaments. Yes, the professionals seem to win more often than not, but you can't really say why someone won. Was he better at money management, was he a better bluffer, did he read tells better, Did he understand the probabilities of making a hand better than others, or did he just get the right cards at the right time?

Could you explain this idea of Jewish control of the media throughout the West? I'm not sure it holds true in the UK (despite what Muslim websites may say) and certainly struggle to imagine that the German media has any notable number of Jewish leaders encouraging the madness of Merkel.

USA media dominate other medias…

Domino effect

And German media still have a lot of Jews, half, cripto and shabbo Goys there…

Awful and old fashioned arguments

Jews just reprogrammed the cultural system, creating a new reward system. The rest is to the gullible goy as you, if you are…

An enhanced Darwinian fitness only made possible by the intellectual contributions of science and technology (medicine, food, fossil fuels) given to them by the unfit whites.

An enhanced Darwinian fitness only made possible by the intellectual contributions of science and technology (medicine, food, fossil fuels) given to them by the unfit whites.

Indicating an inability of Europeans to think things through, with the result that they now face a genocidal tide of Muslim settlers intent on conquest by the womb not the sword, plus a mass of highly philoprogenitive African fleeing Muslim persecution.

Indicating an inability of Europeans to think things through, with the result that they now face a genocidal tide of Muslim settlers intent on conquest by the womb not the sword, plus a mass of highly philoprogenitive African fleeing Muslim persecution

.

First, you are confusing intelligence with wisdom. The fact that many Euro elites pursue destructive immigration policies hardly makes them stupid, it is an indictment of their values. Secondly- destructive to whom? Oftentimes not the elites nor their employers who are protected from the downside of immigration, in fact benefit from lower wages and even more importantly use immigrants as cannon fodder in their battle against the real enemy, a coherent, nationalist middle class. Once the great middle class is fully suppressed the taming of low IQ 3rd world illiterates would seem trivial.

Wrong. The most important feature of a Scrabble player is high level mathematical ability. The only US citizen to reach the finals of the Spanish World Scrabble Championship is Hector Klie. Klie has a PhD from Rice University in computational engineering.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hector-klie-1618667

Chanda discussed the math ability of Scrabble players extensively in his previous column, but his columns are too long and few people are reading them. I suggest doing a Ctrl-F for "math" in his previous column.

This is an anecdote of little value. High level mathematical ability has nothing to do with memorizing simple rules about the value of numbers and being able to add them up.

There are plenty of card counters in black jack who don’t have PhDs in math. That whole 21 movie nonsense makes it seem they are doing something truly amazing but they are not. I read Ken Huston’s book. He led plenty of card counting teams and none of them were from MIT or had anything of special note.

Chanda discussed the math ability of Scrabble players extensively in his previous column,

And I can make any claim I want to and throw as much pixie dust as I want to in the air with irrelevant anecdotes. This is what social “science” does regularly. The problem with this assertion is that you only need one example of an excellent Scrabble player without a serious mathematics pedigree to show it isn’t true. Now do you really think everybody playing Scrabble at a high level is capable of getting a PhD in math?

He is purposely vague and indirect to start from your theory. We usually have a "abstract" first, a introduction explaining what the person will talk or develop.

He's arguing that Africans, black Africans, are far smarter than Lynn et al works have found ( i don't see any estimative from Chisala). He argue that because African blacks seems are overrepresented in scrabble international championships so it mean they, black Africans, namely those on western Africa coast, may impossible to have such lower average IQ-intelligence, aka ~ 70. He also showed some "evidences" that the avg black Africans are at least on the same level than white Europeans trying to deconstruct the selective immigration "hypothesis" to explain why the higher avg IQ-intelligence of ((some group of)) African immigrants. The sky is not the limit. In my understanding if black africans are far smarter than 70-75 IQ-intelligence, maybe we need upgrade the avg IQ of all other human groups for example Indians.

There is a good, logic but possibly infactual argument in favor to this theory. "We" tend to have (usually correct) prejudice against extroverts. It's commonly associate "stupidity" with lower intelligence and blacks are characteristically more extroverted than most other human groups. Avg Italian IQ has been reported to be higher ~ 102 and Italians tend to be very extroverted. Of course we don't know if this higher estimative is because northern Italy or if this studies have little samples...

But he's not honest enough to talk in objective and crescent way, ordered way. He say there are alternative biological and environmental explanations for "lower IQ" of African blacks, it's not a "fixed" trait just like light eyes has been for northern Europeans. He already argue that afro Americans are less intelligent than black Africans because the first have redneck lower IQ"genes" via paternal lineages that reduce "genotypical IQ".

"60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time."

Is this the best you can do? Is it just a coincidence that blacks, on average, have the morphology and muscle fiber typing that, at the elite level, would have them excel at the game?

Today the NBA is 80 percent black. Today the NFL is 60 percent black. Today the MLB is 8 percent black and with 'Hispanic' blacks (islanders), they make up about 34 percent of the MLB and dominate there too. So look at what happens when there is an 'even' playing field in terms of nutrition and opportunities to excel in these sports.

Actually blacks are giving up on baseball and their numbers keep dropping as Latinos move in. Maybe it has a lot to do with basketball and football being instant pro or out sports and baseball is a grind through the minors unless you have the talent to be a star.

I know that. The divide is noticed between white "Hispanics" and black "Hispanics" as well. Refer to my article on the Excerpt from Taboo. Blacks dominate baseball, especially at things that take speed (doubles, triples, base stealing).

No problem. I always find it hilarious whenever people cite is Italian "IQ data". Because Lynn is so dishonest with that.

If you're looking for something, you're going to find it. (Mr. Chanda Chisala should take this phrase and think about it for a second in regards to his articles here... Though I do believe he's proven that the, IQ for Gabon isn't that low).

Lynn is, largely, a dishonest researcher. People like pumpkinperson may say that Lynn is "getting old" and that's why he's not thorough. Haha. Sure thing.

Scrabble is a bit like poker, there are different levels of skills, but in the end a bit of luck is required at crucial points of a game between rivals of similar ability.

To play Scrabble, you need a bit of mental dexterity to see what can be make out of your seven letters and how to get high scoring letters on the right squares, then to play at an advanced level you need to memorize all the obscure words that are only ever used in Scrabble in your language, especially those two letter words using high value letters, then you need to add on strategic skills like knowing what letters have not yet been used, what your opponent might have, what the possible dangers are, and so on.

Consider the kinds of abilities tested on the WAIS: verbal comprehension, spatio-visual ability, and concentration. Is there any question that Feynman was very well-endowed with all? His books are cogently written, his theories require spatial visualization, etc. Are you truly agnostic about whether Feynman has these abilities, that he can’t define easy words, see similarities, and solve visual puzzles?

You don’t seem very well informed about Richard Feynman. Most of his books were ghost-written including the celebrated Lectures on Physics. This is consistent with his poor grades on everything but math and physics at the time he entered graduate school at Princeton.

There is no reason to doubt that Feynman was brilliant mathematically, that he had extraordinary insight as a physicist, and that he could solve incredible difficult problems in other areas. Moreover, he was certainly both articulate and charismatic when speaking of things that interested him. Here for example, explaining what keeps a train on the track.

But all that that shows is that a person can be terrifically intelligent, as normal people understand the word “intelligent” without having a terrifically high IQ. After all, the concept of g is based on correlation among cognitive aptitudes, but the average correlation is low, with a coefficient of determination of 0.5 or less. So why should Feynman not have been brilliant in some, in fact in many, respects while yet having an IQ score no higher than 124. He was simply not an all-rounder. Musically, the best he could do was play the bongo drums; on general topics, his writing without the aid of a co-author was neither polished nor profound; and and his art work was mediocre.

True; I wasn't aware that his books were ghostwritten. Makes a big difference. (Scratch that argument.)

A little googling tells me the consensus is that Feynman had some kind of verbal deficit. (It seems likely that he was dyslexic. "he sometimes hung his keys on the right side of his belt to help him remember which was his right hand." - http://labvislearn.com/topic/feynman-dyslexic/)

So, what would happen, then, if Feynman had taken a stardard individual intelligence test? If he took (today's) WAIS, he would show a very large difference between Verbal and Performance subtests. (This might require assuming that the WAIS has a higher ceiling that it does.) A competent psychologist would refuse to report a Full Scale IQ, since it would be meaningless in light of such disparate components. (Which is to say, on its face, both scores cannot be measuring g.)

You may respond that this is a fudge in that relevant evidence against g is being automatically discounted. But 1) such large discrepancies are rare; and 2) the deficit is circumscribed (Feynman was an engaging speaker.)

Szopen: However I note that acc to the studies on scrabble I read, one have to spent a LOT of time on a single activity (4-5 hours per day, one study claimed). That level of fixation is rather not expected from women.

I think szopen’s statement is an excellent point and goes a long way to explaining the sex differences at high levels.

No.

Szopen forgets a point I keep repeating: the gender disparity in Scrabble championship begins *before* that professional adult level (where many hours are spent per day): it is there quite early in high school. The top Scrabble finalists are almost always boys, even with high female participation.

Can you point me to the data supporting that again, please? Is that true in all countries?

Obviously! Otherwise, the IQ-ist theory is refuted. An admirable demonstration, may I say, of how to derive a premise from a desired conclusion.

Let me ask you a question. If an adult IQ test result (such as a WAIS test) were discovered, would you expect that it would substantiate the 124 IQ or be much higher? Or would you truly have no expectation?

Consider the kinds of abilities tested on the WAIS: verbal comprehension, spatio-visual ability, and concentration. Is there any question that Feynman was very well-endowed with all? His books are cogently written, his theories require spatial visualization, etc. Are you truly agnostic about whether Feynman has these abilities, that he can't define easy words, see similarities, and solve visual puzzles?

Let me ask you a question. If an adult IQ test result (such as a WAIS test) were discovered, would you expect that it would substantiate the 124 IQ or be much higher? Or would you truly have no expectation?

1) Do we have firm evidence about the genetic makeup of these players from Gabon et al?

2) Even at 70 mean and 12sd, a 130 IQ is only 5 standard deviations away, which means the top 0.006% will have a 130 IQ and above, even without taking into account fat tails. That's more than 100 people in Gabon alone.

3) The author assumes that "of course all the smart people wouldn't just play board games" ... the research on IQ gaps suggests the opposite. People at the extreme edges of IQ are usually socially isolated and incomprehensible to their peers. I imagine this is only exacerbated in Africa where intelligence isn't prized like it is in the west. I would expect even more severe nerd in-grouping among intelligent Africans.

2) Even at 70 mean and 12sd, a 130 IQ is only 5 standard deviations away, which means the top 0.006% will have a 130 IQ and above, even without taking into account fat tails. That’s more than 100 people in Gabon alone.

No, your math is completely wrong. There should not be “more than 100 people” in Gabon at that IQ and SD. There should be ZERO — or *less* than 1 person (even without correcting your elevated IQ 70 for Gabon).

Wrong. The most important feature of a Scrabble player is high level mathematical ability. The only US citizen to reach the finals of the Spanish World Scrabble Championship is Hector Klie. Klie has a PhD from Rice University in computational engineering.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hector-klie-1618667

Chanda discussed the math ability of Scrabble players extensively in his previous column, but his columns are too long and few people are reading them. I suggest doing a Ctrl-F for "math" in his previous column.

Plenty of blame to go around for sure. It is obviously ridiculous to blame the Jews for the suicidal tendencies of far too many white people. All one has to do is talk with a brain dead white liberal to know you are dealing with a form of madness.

But Jewish control of the media throughout the West has certainly played an outsized role in leading the goyim to pursue civilizational suicide. The goyim have to develop an immunity to the siren song of cultural destruction coming from the Jewish pied pipers, before the suicide march is halted.

But Jewish control of the media throughout the West has certainly played an outsized role in leading the goyim to pursue civilizational suicide. The goyim have to develop an immunity to the siren song of cultural destruction coming from the Jewish pied pipers, before the suicide march is halted.

Now as a heretical Jew, I agree that the subset of Jews to whom you refer have a powerful forum for their toxic worldview. Diversity is certainly the greatest strength of plutocrats. But where is the moral agency of non-Jewish Westerners (regardless of race) in this slow suicide?

As a whole Americans had decades upon decades after the 1965 immigration bill to resist the population boom in the Global South. The 1986 amnesty for illegals should have been a wake up call. And Christians who superstitiously oppose family planning hampered NGO efforts when it was still politically feasible to aggressively demand its implementation as a condition of visas, foreign aid, etc.

Instead at every turn Americans as a whole have opted for mindless acquiescence to economic internationalist agenda, choosing the non-confrontational, materially-comfortable path over the virtuous one. That in turn opens the door for the West-hating radicals to gain influence and power.

The author makes a judo-like use of his opponents’ arguments. That can go both ways. Allow [at least for argument's sake] that the difference between African mean IQ and e.g. European is not due to genetic causation.

African elites are often at least as foolish as European and North American elites, and often worse, but lack the material power to do as much damage to the world. Idiocies such as messing with iodisation programs, allowing lead paint, poisoning entire regions and stripping entire ethnic groups of their land tenure in their ancestral lands, playing economic games, by which countries gain foreign exchange for exporting their animal protein instead of consuming it locally, failure to ban mercury-based skin bleaches, to name a few.

On what basis does the author deny that the actual mean IQ is roughly as advertised? As was pointed out in comment 66, quoted by the author in 147, mixed populations with individual Gaussian distributions but with separate means, will not have a Gaussian distribution overall. That applies both to (biological) environmental causation and to genetic causation. Allow, for example, an elite subpopulation, perhaps 10 percent with east Asian mean IQ and 15 points SD. That would allow more than just scrabble. They merely need to constitute a small portion of the population, and an overall 65 mean 12 point SD distribution (albeit not Gaussian) is still very much possible; if they have the typical arrogant attitudes that typically come with being elites, the overall IQ distribution may be underestimated slightly, as the elites don’t condescend to participate in such studies.

The author’s notion that mere education would be the missing ingredient, is a farce. The author is from Zambia. Botswana started with arrangements under trees; today they send their better students abroad for undergraduate study. Perhaps the problem is that African elites are not too considerate of their fellow citizens. Gated communities are as much a reality in Africa as outside, if not more. The elites send their children abroad, by and large. The author is anti-socialist, yet the west is internally much more socialist than is generally acknowledged—and I say this as praise, despite the west’s external conduct, although that socialism is now collapsing. The likely distribution of IQ for most African countries is rather poor, and addressing that would likely require addressing protein consumption, food production, environmental poisons, slums and shantytowns, and so forth.

As such, I pose a challenge to the author—find out the degree of iodine deficiency in his country, or for that matter lead paint (using a legitimate proxy—bone lead measured with K-edge fluorescence, rather than the ab initio fraud of blood lead—a competent medical physicist can rig up a setup for under 10K$ US given a functioning hospital, running an x-ray tube at say 120kV, with thin heavy metal filters from protactinium closest to the tube down element by element to bismuth, each separated by leather, and a final filter of say tungsten—then calibrate the detectors using a solution of lead salt). Or cheaper yet—using freely available teaching materials, teach age-appropriate math to slum or even median income family children—it is a crying shame that most African countries avoid participating in international math olympiads—estimate their intelligence given the knowledge.

A quick correction in my example---the population standard deviation would be 18 minimum points, but 90 percent of the population, who are likely to be measured during typical national IQ measurements, may have a 12 point SD.

“African nominal national IQs are artificially depressed by more than 30 IQ points”

There’s nothing “artificially depressed” about the situation. Modernity is the anomaly of the human condition.

It would be one thing if you presented this issue in more of an isn’t this an interesting phenomenon to consider manner rather than with this “case closed” posturing, which fitting ends with meaningless name-calling (“crazy”).

This issue will be resolved by widespread IQ testing and robust, corresponding genetic analysis, especially of mixed-race siblings. This argument is an interesting aside, but it takes blinding arrogance to imagine it is some sort of substantive refutation of a hypothesis rooted in decades of associated data and research.

The author makes a judo-like use of his opponents' arguments. That can go both ways. Allow [at least for argument's sake] that the difference between African mean IQ and e.g. European is not due to genetic causation.

African elites are often at least as foolish as European and North American elites, and often worse, but lack the material power to do as much damage to the world. Idiocies such as messing with iodisation programs, allowing lead paint, poisoning entire regions and stripping entire ethnic groups of their land tenure in their ancestral lands, playing economic games, by which countries gain foreign exchange for exporting their animal protein instead of consuming it locally, failure to ban mercury-based skin bleaches, to name a few.

On what basis does the author deny that the actual mean IQ is roughly as advertised? As was pointed out in comment 66, quoted by the author in 147, mixed populations with individual Gaussian distributions but with separate means, will not have a Gaussian distribution overall. That applies both to (biological) environmental causation and to genetic causation. Allow, for example, an elite subpopulation, perhaps 10 percent with east Asian mean IQ and 15 points SD. That would allow more than just scrabble. They merely need to constitute a small portion of the population, and an overall 65 mean 12 point SD distribution (albeit not Gaussian) is still very much possible; if they have the typical arrogant attitudes that typically come with being elites, the overall IQ distribution may be underestimated slightly, as the elites don't condescend to participate in such studies.

The author's notion that mere education would be the missing ingredient, is a farce. The author is from Zambia. Botswana started with arrangements under trees; today they send their better students abroad for undergraduate study. Perhaps the problem is that African elites are not too considerate of their fellow citizens. Gated communities are as much a reality in Africa as outside, if not more. The elites send their children abroad, by and large. The author is anti-socialist, yet the west is internally much more socialist than is generally acknowledged---and I say this as praise, despite the west's external conduct, although that socialism is now collapsing. The likely distribution of IQ for most African countries is rather poor, and addressing that would likely require addressing protein consumption, food production, environmental poisons, slums and shantytowns, and so forth.

As such, I pose a challenge to the author---find out the degree of iodine deficiency in his country, or for that matter lead paint (using a legitimate proxy---bone lead measured with K-edge fluorescence, rather than the ab initio fraud of blood lead---a competent medical physicist can rig up a setup for under 10K$ US given a functioning hospital, running an x-ray tube at say 120kV, with thin heavy metal filters from protactinium closest to the tube down element by element to bismuth, each separated by leather, and a final filter of say tungsten---then calibrate the detectors using a solution of lead salt). Or cheaper yet---using freely available teaching materials, teach age-appropriate math to slum or even median income family children---it is a crying shame that most African countries avoid participating in international math olympiads---estimate their intelligence given the knowledge.

A quick correction in my example—the population standard deviation would be 18 minimum points, but 90 percent of the population, who are likely to be measured during typical national IQ measurements, may have a 12 point SD.

Rereading his comment I agree it is not clear which is so. My sense was a bit of both. IMO Chanda has some good arguments, but there tends to be some fluidity in which are advanced at any given time (this can trend towards motte and bailey if not careful). From the introduction above I see a few different arguments being advanced.

I argued that Africans should not be able to come anywhere near dominating the games of Scrabble (both English and French) or professional checkers, as they apparently do, if their real biological intelligence was anywhere near as low as their nominal IQ scores might indicate. Although these board games evidently require very high intelligence at the top competitive world championship level (not necessarily at the home level with your dad), and attract extremely nerdy math types, they have the specific advantage of not being too affected by the well-known learning/training resource gaps that exist between rich and poor populations.

As I see it, this is the primary argument. I find it compelling except for the extremely vague "come anywhere near dominating." That phrase renders it as implying anything from "Gabon cannot have a true genetic IQ with mean 70 and SD 12" to "there must not be any underlying differences in true genetic IQ because there has been an African Scrabble champion." The former is an excellent motte argument which has been conceded by almost all commenters here AFAICT. The latter is a bailey which I don't think anyone is asserting in the strong form, but I think there have been comments trending that way without adequate support.

My argument is therefore not against the low IQ score estimates for African nations (by Richard Lynn, et al), but whether this reflects some restrictive racially linked genetic cause. If it is indeed basically genetic, it should practically be impossible to find any area of relative cognitive performance of Africans that is inconsistent with this large IQ deficit with whites and other groups.

I see this as a restatement of what I called the motte. The problem I have here is the vagueness of "basically genetic". That can mean anything from non-zero to almost completely. I think the genetic contribution to the IQ differences is clearly neither zero nor total (Charles Murray was pilloried for saying something similar regarding American blacks. The Bell Curve has much more detailed support for an assertion like this.) I have proposed (by 80-85 genetic estimate contrasted to 70 observed) that environment accounts for a half to a third of the observed IQ difference. I don't see anyone else really engaging with that argument.

I also think this restatement inadequately allows for subpopulation differences in either or both of genetics or environment. At one time Gabon had a French educated elite which I suspect would qualify on both counts. However, I don't have enough knowledge of Africa in general and Gabon in particular to take a good look at this. What frustrates me is I believe Chanda has the expertise to check this hypothesis, but I have yet to see him do so in enough detail for me to dismiss it.

If, on the other hand, the cause is basically environmental (specifically, learning resource deficiencies), then some exceptions are bound to exist and these will predictably only be found in areas in which the cognitive challenges are high but the learning resource requirements (books, well-trained teachers etc) are extremely minimal. Performance on such cognitively demanding but bookless contests will far exceed even academic areas that are light on cognitive demands but heavy on book learning (eg soft subjects like sociology etc, where you still find no Africans at the top). The genetic Racial Hypothesis predicts that the gap should be even bigger in favor of whites as you go to the more naturally complex contests like Scrabble (see Spearman’s Hypothesis.) In short, if there was to be any exception to inferior African intellectual performance, it should have been in the softer fields where there are less of the gifted math types to contend with.

And here is where I really start having problems. First, more vagueness, starting with "basically environmental". Second, "basically genetic/environmental" is a false dichotomy. A mix is clearly possible as well as the possibility of there being multiple causes as both szopen and I have proposed. Third, limiting environmental effects to "specifically, learning resource deficiencies". I believe both culture and nutrition are significant environmental effects in Africa. This false dichotomy also ignores non-IQ genetic effects (e.g. specific other intellectual skills, or other traits like persistence).

"Performance on such cognitively demanding but bookless contests will far exceed even academic areas that are light on cognitive demands but heavy on book learning (eg soft subjects like sociology etc, where you still find no Africans at the top)." is supportable, and provides a guide to where to look. But, I think there needs to be more effort to look at both confirming and disconfirming (e.g. chess?) examples.

I basically agree with "The genetic Racial Hypothesis predicts that the gap should be even bigger in favor of whites as you go to the more naturally complex contests like Scrabble (see Spearman’s Hypothesis.)" but think this also needs to consider specific skills. For an analogy, consider American black dominance in "athletics." This seems to be driven by specific skills (e.g. sprinting in West Africans) rather than some kind of overall "athletic g." If you look closely sports vary in racial ability differences and I think this is attributable to differences in both genetic specific skill profiles and preferences (IMO the same is true of Scrabble).

"In short, if there was to be any exception to inferior African intellectual performance, it should have been in the softer fields where there are less of the gifted math types to contend with." Rather than being a summary, this actually brings in another aspect to the issue. Earlier he talked about resource availability, here he is talking about the presence of competition. I discuss this above as "comparative advantage" and "other interests" and think it is an important point. The question is, how does elite Scrabble actually stack up here? Both in terms of ability profile and in terms of desirability for people with those abilities. As an analogy, I think it likely that the NBA draws most of the top basketball talent available in the US (and increasingly the world). It is much less likely speed skating draws most of the people best able to succeed in that sport. Which does Scrabble more resemble? What kind of other activities might someone who has top tier Scrabble potential engage in (in both Africa and the rest of the world)? For comparison we might consider chess. My experience has been that the nerdy math types tend to go for chess rather than Scrabble AND in more developed countries tend to use their math skills professionally which is time consuming.

I think an interesting question to explore would be what kinds of work activities are these Scrabble champions, and their families (to look at relevant specific genetic traits), engaged in and what kind of success are they achieving?

If it's possible, I think a one paragraph summary of Chanda's primary argument including testable assertions would be very helpful to this discussion.

It’s like if there was “F” for fitness general factor. OK, the analogy is stupid, but maybe it will help you understand.

There you go again. The IQ-ist put-down, you have a comprehension deficit!

But as a physiologist, I don't find the fitness analogy stupid at all. Indeed, I have even suggested several physiological causes of variation in g. See my g is for glutamate, for example. Or a defect or low gain in the GABA-ergic transduction pathway, that seems to play a role in autism, could be another of many factors affecting mental performance.

Further, I don't disagree with much of what you say. But when you say:

That would mean that, for example, on average people with IQ 115 would have higher chances to be top players than people with IQ of 70, but there would not be discernible difference between 115 and 120.

you are talking in vague generalizations only. In specific cases you are spectacularly wrong, e.g., the cases of the three winner of the Nobel Prize in physics that I have already mentioned, and the people who win commercially profitable patents, earn a PhD at 22, hold academic appointments, run successful companies, without necessarily having an exceptional IQ.

Moreover it seems you fail to realize how radically your generalization is refuted in some cases, e.g., the musical genius of Derek Paravicini (IQ less than 35), or the compulsive obsessive genius of not only Feynman, but of Einstein, who spend much time imagining what it would be like to travel with a ray of light, or Jacques Monod, who thought deeply about the conformational transformation of proteins acting as enzyme catalysts.

In general, it seems to me that the obsession with IQ as a determining factor in individual and national success is just about as unsound as Nazi ideology about the superiority of the Nordic type. IQ is a highly culture-loaded measure, and the assumption that you can compare these kids, with these kids by means of an IQ test seems to me totally daft.

Now if you had some physiological measures, that differentiated among racial groups, I'd be more interested.

In the meantime, those stupid Africans are multiplying like crazy, going from 0.9 billion in 2010 to 2.0 billion in 2o50, while those brilliant Americans, Europeans, Askenazi Jews, etc. fail to achieve even a replacement fertility. Whoever may be the dopes here, it is obvious who has the superior Darwinian fitness.

Once again, what do you not understand about “there are exceptions” and “g is nto everything”?

Once again, what do you not understand about “there are exceptions” and “g is nto everything”?

a reasonable person would assume you had said it at least "once" already.

Which you haven't.

But I will be patient.

By "there are exceptions" you would probably say (if you were sufficiently courteous as to explain) that you mean that there are exceptions to the rule that the mythical g, which cannot be directly measured and which has no known material basis, whether physiological, anatomical, or experiential, dictates that individuals will show uniform brightness or dimness in all cognitive domains.

So, yes, I do understand what you are struggling to articulate, but I reject what you suggest I fail to understand because it is based on a misconception.

And if g is a misconception, then there is nothing to understand in the contention that it "is nto (sic) everything."

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

For whatever reasons (cultural priority, cognitive friendly environment, genes, Jews who have got smart using nepotistic networks to induct average Jew into the cognitive elite), Jews aren’t dumb. But when politically correct mores are stripped away, they are often reviled. As Evola said, Europeans found something about the Jewish culture and behavoural habits deeply revolting. And judging by ongoing Jewish attempts to deconstruct traditional European culture, they feel the same way about us.

It's not that simple. "Jews" from your example are Middle-Eastern aliens- this was European perception of them, shared by assimilated German-American Jews who commented on mass Jewish immigration at the turn of the century: "Jews are an Asiatic horde".-while assimilated Jews are, socio-culturally, not too different from your Joe Six-pack. What fuels antisemitism is behavior of some percentage of Jews who try to subvert dominant cultural norms & act as inimical aliens. But- they're in the minority, I'd say 10-15% of them. And then all Jews pay the price for transgressions & mischievous behavior of their (former) co-religionists.

We all know about the Jews ‘ordeal of civilization’, in which they adopted the outer forms of the culture where they lived while retaining deep inside a discreet Jewish identity.

Since society today has moved closer to modern Jewish norms, the gap between Jews and some Europeans has narrowed. Yet your claim its just 10-15% of troublemakers is still absurd. Most Jews vote with the coalition of the fringe (against Anglo-Protestant America) that is the Democratic Party. The ones who don’t are hardcore Zionists. I would say the 10-15% figure represents the proportion of Jews with access to real cultural power. Every Jew who becomes elite supports the liberal global agenda. Most Jews are thus responsible because they form the ground of enculturation for their elites.

The very fact they still identity as ‘Jews’ speaks to their distinct identity. They hide under the WWII propaganda of ‘Judaeo-Christian’ values as if they are the same. Take that away and they’re no different to Muslims, only sharper, more resentful, and more practiced at subversion.

I'll take a closer look at your other points and posts later, but for now you'll have to explain for me your logic in this statement, which you apparently need to be true:

However, the fact that average top scrabble players in Europe or America may have IQ of 140 does not mean one need IQ of 140 to be a top player

This is only true if there is no connection between their being "top Scrabble players" and having that IQ of 140.

If within Europe or America, a lower IQ person has a disadvantage against the 140 IQ players, can you explain to me exactly how he would not have that same disadvantage just because he happens to have migrated from Africa? (That's exactly what you're saying.) And whatever answer you give (I can't begin to imagine what that is), can you also explain why this strange African exceptionality does not seem to apply to native black Americans?

You're on the verge of suggesting that Africans need something other than intelligence to achieve what requires intelligence among other groups. I'm sure you can see the contradictions inherent in that suggestion.

No – my point was not that Scrabble requires intelligence in whites, but something else in Africans.

First of all, it does not seem like all top Scrabble players have IQ of 140, only that some have.

My hypothesis was much less controversial and it consists of three points

(1) Hypothetical differences in gaps

We know that the gaps on different cognitive abilities differ not just between whites and blacks, but also whites and east asians.

Hence, I speculated that maybe there is a set of abilities helpful with playing scrabble, let’s call them “Sc”, for example large working memory (and we know that when matched for IQ, american blacks have better working memory), quick numerical addition, some visual reasoning and so on. The “Sc” may be highly correlated with some math abilities – but “correlation” would not mean that there will be no people high on hypothetical “Sc”, yet lacking other math skills.

“Sc” will be obviously “g” loaded. The question is then, will the g-loading be the same in whites and blacks?

What if to get the same score on hypothetical “Sc” one would have to get 115 in whites, but only 100 in blacks?

(2) Higher IQ scores
Gabon can not have IQ score of 64 or even of 70. I speculate it must have higher score, in lower 80s. Obviously, Gabon would have to have higher IQ even with a model I proposed in previous installments of “scrabble oddyssey”, where there would be a subpopulation with substantially higher average IQ than the general population. In fact, if the scrabble would indeed require IQ of 140, the size and/or average IQ of the postulated subpopulation would have to be big enough to raise average IQ of Gabon substantially, which is why previously I was against this hypothesis (Johan Meyer tries to save this hypothesis by saying “elites do not participate in the studies of IQ” which i find unlikely – note that at 140IQ threshold in his hypothesis there would be something like 3000 people potentially eligible to be top players without correcting for age).

(3) Expertise role
Imagine that you can defeat some intelligence differences by experience and diminishing returns from higher intelligence (non-linear relation between IQ and ability to play scrabble).

That is, say that (pure speculation, of course) there is no way, realistically, one can defeat a difference between 70IQ and 140IQ. However, let’s say that to defeat 115IQ, a person with 100IQ would have to train 5 hours per day more; while to defeat 130IQ, a person with 115IQ would have to train only 2 hours per day more and so on.

Yes, Europeans also could have train more, but the question is: what if Scrabble is more important to African players and Europeans, who have propensity to train the same number of hours, decide to invest their times in different games? What if at some level of play, once you pass minimal IQ threshold (or minimal “Sc” threshold), all that counts is the number of hours you train?

That is: say european with IQ140 finds out he can beat local scrabble competition with little training; so initially, at no-professional level, only IQ counts. Then he finds out that at some level IQ alone is not enough, starts training when starting facing really tough competition, at the professional level – where only level of hours count.

That would explain neatly even the scenario when Europeans players would have IQ high, while African not so; and that explanation would not even requires postulating that Africans are using different set of skills to achieve exactly the same what is achieved by European players by intelligence.

Per gender gap: there are differences in brain structure between females/males, and – as you surely know – there are differences on different subtests of cognitive abilities between males and females. Hence, if Scrabble calls for some specific subset of coginitive abilities, it may call on abilities where gender gap is larger than on “g”. Even postulating “100″ score for girls with smaller variation, and “105″ for boys on that specific subset of hypothetical abilities, and a very modest “105″ score for “being top player”, you can calculate that there will be 5 boys for 3.6 girls. Since I don’t know what “domination” of boys means, I cannot comment further.

To summarise: I agree you posted a valid problem which has to be explained. But I am not fully convinced the problem means we should ditch all the other evidence. I am also aware that I am speculating, but then – I do not feel ONE or two pieces of evidence pointing in one direction should be more important than a lot of evidence pointing in another direction.

Girls also tend not to be good in strategic video games, even in simple video games "boys" tend to be better. Intrinsic motivation correlates with talent but.... Maybe we can have talent or potential without motivation. So only way to know if girls are worse than boys in, my example, video games, would be inviting ~ 95% of girls to be compared with boys and to know if this lack of motivation to play games also reflects a lack of natural talent to do it among most girls or if we have dissociation scenario between intrinsic motivation and natural potential.

I bet that girls dislike to play video games because they lacks natural talent to do it. I believe this psychological obsessiveness/cognitive feature of autism is larger common among men than among women.

Thank you for expressing much of what I haven't geared myself up to write ny way of comment. As I have always been sceptical about the ridiculously low figures faithfully peddled by Philippe Rushton as well as Richsrd Lynn I was pleased to see you point out tbat a more realistic average IQ in the 80s for sub Saharan Africans would disrupt much of CC's argument based on the straw man (as I see it) of aversge IQ 70 Africans. I also speculate asyou do that there vould well be castes and aubpopulations which have much higher average IQs.

Perhapa what ia needed is for some billionaire on liberal anti-racist pretext to finance the gathering of good cognitive testing data from large samples of each of the many different peoples plof black Africa after considerable training for the tests. Zp0

Your speculative theory is statistically contradicted by the simple fact that the math majors are vastly over-represented among the extremely good players/champions. It should not be too difficult to completely exterminate such a tiny group from the top if what you say is true.

This does not seem correct. If IQ is mostly genetic, then you really have to know the exact genetic makeup of an individual to determine if they are representative of their putative race, don’t you?
And even all things being equal, we know that IQ lies on a (dare I say it?) bell curve, where you expect to have high and low out-liers.

My non-academic view is mostly practical. Look at average outcomes. What most people think of as “intelligence” is really a combination of IQ and common sense (including future orientation, etc.). Either one without the other will not produce as good of an outcome.

I’ve read a few of these Chisala articles and I’m always lost as to what the actual argument is.

Do you suffer from low g, perhaps?

Maybe not.

He is purposely vague and indirect to start from your theory. We usually have a “abstract” first, a introduction explaining what the person will talk or develop.

He’s arguing that Africans, black Africans, are far smarter than Lynn et al works have found ( i don’t see any estimative from Chisala). He argue that because African blacks seems are overrepresented in scrabble international championships so it mean they, black Africans, namely those on western Africa coast, may impossible to have such lower average IQ-intelligence, aka ~ 70. He also showed some “evidences” that the avg black Africans are at least on the same level than white Europeans trying to deconstruct the selective immigration “hypothesis” to explain why the higher avg IQ-intelligence of ((some group of)) African immigrants. The sky is not the limit. In my understanding if black africans are far smarter than 70-75 IQ-intelligence, maybe we need upgrade the avg IQ of all other human groups for example Indians.

There is a good, logic but possibly infactual argument in favor to this theory. “We” tend to have (usually correct) prejudice against extroverts. It’s commonly associate “stupidity” with lower intelligence and blacks are characteristically more extroverted than most other human groups. Avg Italian IQ has been reported to be higher ~ 102 and Italians tend to be very extroverted. Of course we don’t know if this higher estimative is because northern Italy or if this studies have little samples…

But he’s not honest enough to talk in objective and crescent way, ordered way. He say there are alternative biological and environmental explanations for “lower IQ” of African blacks, it’s not a “fixed” trait just like light eyes has been for northern Europeans. He already argue that afro Americans are less intelligent than black Africans because the first have redneck lower IQ”genes” via paternal lineages that reduce “genotypical IQ”.

I don't have time now to summarize Chisala's article for you, and anyhow, with an IQ of 132 you must be able to figure it out for yourself if you put your mind to it.

What I can tell are the conclusions I draw from the article and the discussion to which it has given rise:

Among those writing here, are some who maintain that Africans have a deficiency in something called g or general intelligence as evidenced by the generally low African IQ-test scores, commonly said to average between 65 and 75 versus around 100 for white Americans.

What this means is that there are some here who believe most Africans to be gamma-minus morons scarcely able to function at all, and certainly incapable of any form of real intellectual achievement. From this, it follows that if Africans excel at the game of Scrabble it can only be because Scrabble is a dumb game fit only for dumb people to play.

This view seems, however, to be incorrect, since among non-Africans, including Americans, who play Scrabble those who play best are generally high IQ people strong in mathematical ability, i.e., people believed to have plenty of g. So how is this seeming contradiction between the low IQ of African populations and the success of Africans at the — for non-Africans — high IQ game of Scrabble to be explained?

One possible answer is that IQ tests do not provide a cross-culturally, or cross-racially, valid measure of g. Thus African IQ test results are not comparable with non-African IQ test results. Another possibility is that Africans have a different mental aptitude profile to non-Africans, such that they have an exceptionally high Scrabble aptitude while being almost mentally deficient in most if not all other domains of intelligence.

The second alternative has at least some plausibility since we know that the within populations, the correlation coefficients among relative mental aptitude test scores are usually less than 0.7, meaning that population variation in aptitude of one kind typically explains less than 50% of the population variation in aptitude of another kind. Therefore, if Africans have a specially large Scrabble bump, they might indeed beat the world at Scrabble while performing in a relatively abysmal way on other kinds of mental challenge.

If it were in fact the case that Africans have a different ability profile to non-Africans, then what could account for this difference? There appear to be three categories of explanation: environmental, anatomical, or physiological.

Environment, for example, might be important if Africans, while having little in the way of schooling necessary to perform well at most verbal and mathematical aptitude tests, nevertheless gain abundant experience of Scrabble, by virtue of the fact that Scrabble is a wildly popular game among Africans.

An anatomical explanation, reflecting the modularity of the brain, would postulate that the mental bumps or modules of the African brain differ in their relative proportions to those of non-Africans. There is, however, no reputable anatomical evidence to support such a theory. However, one might postulate that a cultural factor, namely the popularity of Scrabble among Africans gives rise to reassignment of neural resources in the way that the prolonged wearing of a blindfold leads to the reassignment of the visual cortex to processing of non-visual information.

A physiological explanation for African achievement at Scrabble is truly difficult to envisage and I will not attempt to offer a suggestion of what might constitute such a theory.

Of the three possibilities, then, the first, an environmental or cultural factor affecting learned ability seems the most plausible explanation for a possibly different ability profile among Africans compared with non-Africans. However, cultural differences between Africans and non-Africans could lead to anatomical differences as the result of the reassignment of neural resources.

It thus seems necessary to conclude that success at competitive Scrabble requires high intelligence, and that the only way to explain the success of African Scrabble players in competition with non-Africans, despite the low reported IQ of Africans is due to cultural differences between Africans and non-Africans giving rise to either (1) IQ test results for Africans and non-Africans that are incommensurable, or (2) a culturally-driven difference between Africans and non-Africans in intellectual aptitude profile. I would put my money on (1).

No - my point was not that Scrabble requires intelligence in whites, but something else in Africans.

First of all, it does not seem like all top Scrabble players have IQ of 140, only that some have.

My hypothesis was much less controversial and it consists of three points

(1) Hypothetical differences in gaps

We know that the gaps on different cognitive abilities differ not just between whites and blacks, but also whites and east asians.

Hence, I speculated that maybe there is a set of abilities helpful with playing scrabble, let's call them "Sc", for example large working memory (and we know that when matched for IQ, american blacks have better working memory), quick numerical addition, some visual reasoning and so on. The "Sc" may be highly correlated with some math abilities - but "correlation" would not mean that there will be no people high on hypothetical "Sc", yet lacking other math skills.

"Sc" will be obviously "g" loaded. The question is then, will the g-loading be the same in whites and blacks?

What if to get the same score on hypothetical "Sc" one would have to get 115 in whites, but only 100 in blacks?

(2) Higher IQ scoresGabon can not have IQ score of 64 or even of 70. I speculate it must have higher score, in lower 80s. Obviously, Gabon would have to have higher IQ even with a model I proposed in previous installments of "scrabble oddyssey", where there would be a subpopulation with substantially higher average IQ than the general population. In fact, if the scrabble would indeed require IQ of 140, the size and/or average IQ of the postulated subpopulation would have to be big enough to raise average IQ of Gabon substantially, which is why previously I was against this hypothesis (Johan Meyer tries to save this hypothesis by saying "elites do not participate in the studies of IQ" which i find unlikely - note that at 140IQ threshold in his hypothesis there would be something like 3000 people potentially eligible to be top players without correcting for age).

(3) Expertise role Imagine that you can defeat some intelligence differences by experience and diminishing returns from higher intelligence (non-linear relation between IQ and ability to play scrabble).

That is, say that (pure speculation, of course) there is no way, realistically, one can defeat a difference between 70IQ and 140IQ. However, let's say that to defeat 115IQ, a person with 100IQ would have to train 5 hours per day more; while to defeat 130IQ, a person with 115IQ would have to train only 2 hours per day more and so on.

Yes, Europeans also could have train more, but the question is: what if Scrabble is more important to African players and Europeans, who have propensity to train the same number of hours, decide to invest their times in different games? What if at some level of play, once you pass minimal IQ threshold (or minimal "Sc" threshold), all that counts is the number of hours you train?

That is: say european with IQ140 finds out he can beat local scrabble competition with little training; so initially, at no-professional level, only IQ counts. Then he finds out that at some level IQ alone is not enough, starts training when starting facing really tough competition, at the professional level - where only level of hours count.

That would explain neatly even the scenario when Europeans players would have IQ high, while African not so; and that explanation would not even requires postulating that Africans are using different set of skills to achieve exactly the same what is achieved by European players by intelligence.

Per gender gap: there are differences in brain structure between females/males, and - as you surely know - there are differences on different subtests of cognitive abilities between males and females. Hence, if Scrabble calls for some specific subset of coginitive abilities, it may call on abilities where gender gap is larger than on "g". Even postulating "100" score for girls with smaller variation, and "105" for boys on that specific subset of hypothetical abilities, and a very modest "105" score for "being top player", you can calculate that there will be 5 boys for 3.6 girls. Since I don't know what "domination" of boys means, I cannot comment further.

To summarise: I agree you posted a valid problem which has to be explained. But I am not fully convinced the problem means we should ditch all the other evidence. I am also aware that I am speculating, but then - I do not feel ONE or two pieces of evidence pointing in one direction should be more important than a lot of evidence pointing in another direction.

Girls also tend not to be good in strategic video games, even in simple video games “boys” tend to be better. Intrinsic motivation correlates with talent but…. Maybe we can have talent or potential without motivation. So only way to know if girls are worse than boys in, my example, video games, would be inviting ~ 95% of girls to be compared with boys and to know if this lack of motivation to play games also reflects a lack of natural talent to do it among most girls or if we have dissociation scenario between intrinsic motivation and natural potential.

I bet that girls dislike to play video games because they lacks natural talent to do it. I believe this psychological obsessiveness/cognitive feature of autism is larger common among men than among women.

Consider the kinds of abilities tested on the WAIS: verbal comprehension, spatio-visual ability, and concentration. Is there any question that Feynman was very well-endowed with all? His books are cogently written, his theories require spatial visualization, etc. Are you truly agnostic about whether Feynman has these abilities, that he can’t define easy words, see similarities, and solve visual puzzles?

You don't seem very well informed about Richard Feynman. Most of his books were ghost-written including the celebrated Lectures on Physics. This is consistent with his poor grades on everything but math and physics at the time he entered graduate school at Princeton.

There is no reason to doubt that Feynman was brilliant mathematically, that he had extraordinary insight as a physicist, and that he could solve incredible difficult problems in other areas. Moreover, he was certainly both articulate and charismatic when speaking of things that interested him. Here for example, explaining what keeps a train on the track.

But all that that shows is that a person can be terrifically intelligent, as normal people understand the word "intelligent" without having a terrifically high IQ. After all, the concept of g is based on correlation among cognitive aptitudes, but the average correlation is low, with a coefficient of determination of 0.5 or less. So why should Feynman not have been brilliant in some, in fact in many, respects while yet having an IQ score no higher than 124. He was simply not an all-rounder. Musically, the best he could do was play the bongo drums; on general topics, his writing without the aid of a co-author was neither polished nor profound; and and his art work was mediocre.

And Feynman was a Ashkenazi Jew, a people with very asymmetric cognitive profile. And we seems don’t know your scores in all subtests.

He is purposely vague and indirect to start from your theory. We usually have a "abstract" first, a introduction explaining what the person will talk or develop.

He's arguing that Africans, black Africans, are far smarter than Lynn et al works have found ( i don't see any estimative from Chisala). He argue that because African blacks seems are overrepresented in scrabble international championships so it mean they, black Africans, namely those on western Africa coast, may impossible to have such lower average IQ-intelligence, aka ~ 70. He also showed some "evidences" that the avg black Africans are at least on the same level than white Europeans trying to deconstruct the selective immigration "hypothesis" to explain why the higher avg IQ-intelligence of ((some group of)) African immigrants. The sky is not the limit. In my understanding if black africans are far smarter than 70-75 IQ-intelligence, maybe we need upgrade the avg IQ of all other human groups for example Indians.

There is a good, logic but possibly infactual argument in favor to this theory. "We" tend to have (usually correct) prejudice against extroverts. It's commonly associate "stupidity" with lower intelligence and blacks are characteristically more extroverted than most other human groups. Avg Italian IQ has been reported to be higher ~ 102 and Italians tend to be very extroverted. Of course we don't know if this higher estimative is because northern Italy or if this studies have little samples...

But he's not honest enough to talk in objective and crescent way, ordered way. He say there are alternative biological and environmental explanations for "lower IQ" of African blacks, it's not a "fixed" trait just like light eyes has been for northern Europeans. He already argue that afro Americans are less intelligent than black Africans because the first have redneck lower IQ"genes" via paternal lineages that reduce "genotypical IQ".

But Jewish control of the media throughout the West has certainly played an outsized role in leading the goyim to pursue civilizational suicide. The goyim have to develop an immunity to the siren song of cultural destruction coming from the Jewish pied pipers, before the suicide march is halted.

Now as a heretical Jew, I agree that the subset of Jews to whom you refer have a powerful forum for their toxic worldview. Diversity is certainly the greatest strength of plutocrats. But where is the moral agency of non-Jewish Westerners (regardless of race) in this slow suicide?

As a whole Americans had decades upon decades after the 1965 immigration bill to resist the population boom in the Global South. The 1986 amnesty for illegals should have been a wake up call. And Christians who superstitiously oppose family planning hampered NGO efforts when it was still politically feasible to aggressively demand its implementation as a condition of visas, foreign aid, etc.

Instead at every turn Americans as a whole have opted for mindless acquiescence to economic internationalist agenda, choosing the non-confrontational, materially-comfortable path over the virtuous one. That in turn opens the door for the West-hating radicals to gain influence and power.

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

Agree. Thank you for freeing me from spending hours formulating the same general arguments … and doing a better job at it.

I’m surprised that Chanda Chisala does not follow up his Scrabble conclusions with the claims that the core of Western knowledge was appropriated from Black Africa in the time of the Pharaohs … or, that Western Civilization reached its technical and organizational successes on the backs of Black slaves.

Chanda appears to have a conclusion in search of a justification … and he is definitely having trouble finding one.

No - my point was not that Scrabble requires intelligence in whites, but something else in Africans.

First of all, it does not seem like all top Scrabble players have IQ of 140, only that some have.

My hypothesis was much less controversial and it consists of three points

(1) Hypothetical differences in gaps

We know that the gaps on different cognitive abilities differ not just between whites and blacks, but also whites and east asians.

Hence, I speculated that maybe there is a set of abilities helpful with playing scrabble, let's call them "Sc", for example large working memory (and we know that when matched for IQ, american blacks have better working memory), quick numerical addition, some visual reasoning and so on. The "Sc" may be highly correlated with some math abilities - but "correlation" would not mean that there will be no people high on hypothetical "Sc", yet lacking other math skills.

"Sc" will be obviously "g" loaded. The question is then, will the g-loading be the same in whites and blacks?

What if to get the same score on hypothetical "Sc" one would have to get 115 in whites, but only 100 in blacks?

(2) Higher IQ scoresGabon can not have IQ score of 64 or even of 70. I speculate it must have higher score, in lower 80s. Obviously, Gabon would have to have higher IQ even with a model I proposed in previous installments of "scrabble oddyssey", where there would be a subpopulation with substantially higher average IQ than the general population. In fact, if the scrabble would indeed require IQ of 140, the size and/or average IQ of the postulated subpopulation would have to be big enough to raise average IQ of Gabon substantially, which is why previously I was against this hypothesis (Johan Meyer tries to save this hypothesis by saying "elites do not participate in the studies of IQ" which i find unlikely - note that at 140IQ threshold in his hypothesis there would be something like 3000 people potentially eligible to be top players without correcting for age).

(3) Expertise role Imagine that you can defeat some intelligence differences by experience and diminishing returns from higher intelligence (non-linear relation between IQ and ability to play scrabble).

That is, say that (pure speculation, of course) there is no way, realistically, one can defeat a difference between 70IQ and 140IQ. However, let's say that to defeat 115IQ, a person with 100IQ would have to train 5 hours per day more; while to defeat 130IQ, a person with 115IQ would have to train only 2 hours per day more and so on.

Yes, Europeans also could have train more, but the question is: what if Scrabble is more important to African players and Europeans, who have propensity to train the same number of hours, decide to invest their times in different games? What if at some level of play, once you pass minimal IQ threshold (or minimal "Sc" threshold), all that counts is the number of hours you train?

That is: say european with IQ140 finds out he can beat local scrabble competition with little training; so initially, at no-professional level, only IQ counts. Then he finds out that at some level IQ alone is not enough, starts training when starting facing really tough competition, at the professional level - where only level of hours count.

That would explain neatly even the scenario when Europeans players would have IQ high, while African not so; and that explanation would not even requires postulating that Africans are using different set of skills to achieve exactly the same what is achieved by European players by intelligence.

Per gender gap: there are differences in brain structure between females/males, and - as you surely know - there are differences on different subtests of cognitive abilities between males and females. Hence, if Scrabble calls for some specific subset of coginitive abilities, it may call on abilities where gender gap is larger than on "g". Even postulating "100" score for girls with smaller variation, and "105" for boys on that specific subset of hypothetical abilities, and a very modest "105" score for "being top player", you can calculate that there will be 5 boys for 3.6 girls. Since I don't know what "domination" of boys means, I cannot comment further.

To summarise: I agree you posted a valid problem which has to be explained. But I am not fully convinced the problem means we should ditch all the other evidence. I am also aware that I am speculating, but then - I do not feel ONE or two pieces of evidence pointing in one direction should be more important than a lot of evidence pointing in another direction.

Thank you for expressing much of what I haven’t geared myself up to write ny way of comment. As I have always been sceptical about the ridiculously low figures faithfully peddled by Philippe Rushton as well as Richsrd Lynn I was pleased to see you point out tbat a more realistic average IQ in the 80s for sub Saharan Africans would disrupt much of CC’s argument based on the straw man (as I see it) of aversge IQ 70 Africans. I also speculate asyou do that there vould well be castes and aubpopulations which have much higher average IQs.

Perhapa what ia needed is for some billionaire on liberal anti-racist pretext to finance the gathering of good cognitive testing data from large samples of each of the many different peoples plof black Africa after considerable training for the tests. Zp0

He is purposely vague and indirect to start from your theory. We usually have a "abstract" first, a introduction explaining what the person will talk or develop.

He's arguing that Africans, black Africans, are far smarter than Lynn et al works have found ( i don't see any estimative from Chisala). He argue that because African blacks seems are overrepresented in scrabble international championships so it mean they, black Africans, namely those on western Africa coast, may impossible to have such lower average IQ-intelligence, aka ~ 70. He also showed some "evidences" that the avg black Africans are at least on the same level than white Europeans trying to deconstruct the selective immigration "hypothesis" to explain why the higher avg IQ-intelligence of ((some group of)) African immigrants. The sky is not the limit. In my understanding if black africans are far smarter than 70-75 IQ-intelligence, maybe we need upgrade the avg IQ of all other human groups for example Indians.

There is a good, logic but possibly infactual argument in favor to this theory. "We" tend to have (usually correct) prejudice against extroverts. It's commonly associate "stupidity" with lower intelligence and blacks are characteristically more extroverted than most other human groups. Avg Italian IQ has been reported to be higher ~ 102 and Italians tend to be very extroverted. Of course we don't know if this higher estimative is because northern Italy or if this studies have little samples...

But he's not honest enough to talk in objective and crescent way, ordered way. He say there are alternative biological and environmental explanations for "lower IQ" of African blacks, it's not a "fixed" trait just like light eyes has been for northern Europeans. He already argue that afro Americans are less intelligent than black Africans because the first have redneck lower IQ"genes" via paternal lineages that reduce "genotypical IQ".

Actually blacks are giving up on baseball and their numbers keep dropping as Latinos move in. Maybe it has a lot to do with basketball and football being instant pro or out sports and baseball is a grind through the minors unless you have the talent to be a star.

I know that. The divide is noticed between white “Hispanics” and black “Hispanics” as well. Refer to my article on the Excerpt from Taboo. Blacks dominate baseball, especially at things that take speed (doubles, triples, base stealing).

No problem. I always find it hilarious whenever people cite is Italian “IQ data”. Because Lynn is so dishonest with that.

If you’re looking for something, you’re going to find it. (Mr. Chanda Chisala should take this phrase and think about it for a second in regards to his articles here… Though I do believe he’s proven that the, IQ for Gabon isn’t that low).

Lynn is, largely, a dishonest researcher. People like pumpkinperson may say that Lynn is “getting old” and that’s why he’s not thorough. Haha. Sure thing.

Appeal to motive is a pattern of argument which consists in challenging a thesis by calling into question the motives of its proposer. It can be considered as a special case of the ad hominem circumstantial argument. As such, this type of argument may be an informal fallacy.

A common feature of appeals to motive is that only the possibility of a motive (however small) is shown, without showing the motive actually existed or, if the motive did exist, that the motive played a role in forming the argument and its conclusion. Indeed, it is often assumed that the mere possibility of motive is evidence enough.

If this is the case, as you propose, then all of the counter arguments to Lynn's papers are to be thrown out because people of Southern Italian descent have problems with his "methodology", they must have a motivation to disprove it because of feelings! I can day that Richard Lynn is a Nordicist and throw out the garbage he proposes. But looking at the data is better, because it's a joke. PISA is not an IQ test bro. It's strongly predicated on school environment. Don't believe me? Read some of the responses to Richard Lynn's papers on the matter.

When people use fallacious arguments, it shows their attitude---or lack thereof---in what is being discussed.

Once again, what do you not understand about "there are exceptions" and "g is nto everything"?

When you say

Once again, what do you not understand about “there are exceptions” and “g is nto everything”?

a reasonable person would assume you had said it at least “once” already.

Which you haven’t.

But I will be patient.

By “there are exceptions” you would probably say (if you were sufficiently courteous as to explain) that you mean that there are exceptions to the rule that the mythical g, which cannot be directly measured and which has no known material basis, whether physiological, anatomical, or experiential, dictates that individuals will show uniform brightness or dimness in all cognitive domains.

So, yes, I do understand what you are struggling to articulate, but I reject what you suggest I fail to understand because it is based on a misconception.

And if g is a misconception, then there is nothing to understand in the contention that it “is nto (sic) everything.”

there are exceptions to the rule that the mythical g, which cannot be directly measured and which has no known material basis, whether physiological, anatomical, or experiential, dictates that individuals will show uniform brightness or dimness in all cognitive domains.

No.
The individuals with higher "g" will TEND to show more brightness in all cognitive domains.

I thought Telfoed John's question was intended to deride Chisala's significant thesis. I was responding in the same spirit. However, if TJ was expressing genuine mystification, I owe him an apology.

As for the concept of g, I truly believe it to be virtually meaningless. But I am inputting this with one finger on a device I am unused to, so I cannot give an explanation now!

Rereading his comment I agree it is not clear which is so. My sense was a bit of both. IMO Chanda has some good arguments, but there tends to be some fluidity in which are advanced at any given time (this can trend towards motte and bailey if not careful). From the introduction above I see a few different arguments being advanced.

I argued that Africans should not be able to come anywhere near dominating the games of Scrabble (both English and French) or professional checkers, as they apparently do, if their real biological intelligence was anywhere near as low as their nominal IQ scores might indicate. Although these board games evidently require very high intelligence at the top competitive world championship level (not necessarily at the home level with your dad), and attract extremely nerdy math types, they have the specific advantage of not being too affected by the well-known learning/training resource gaps that exist between rich and poor populations.

As I see it, this is the primary argument. I find it compelling except for the extremely vague “come anywhere near dominating.” That phrase renders it as implying anything from “Gabon cannot have a true genetic IQ with mean 70 and SD 12″ to “there must not be any underlying differences in true genetic IQ because there has been an African Scrabble champion.” The former is an excellent motte argument which has been conceded by almost all commenters here AFAICT. The latter is a bailey which I don’t think anyone is asserting in the strong form, but I think there have been comments trending that way without adequate support.

My argument is therefore not against the low IQ score estimates for African nations (by Richard Lynn, et al), but whether this reflects some restrictive racially linked genetic cause. If it is indeed basically genetic, it should practically be impossible to find any area of relative cognitive performance of Africans that is inconsistent with this large IQ deficit with whites and other groups.

I see this as a restatement of what I called the motte. The problem I have here is the vagueness of “basically genetic”. That can mean anything from non-zero to almost completely. I think the genetic contribution to the IQ differences is clearly neither zero nor total (Charles Murray was pilloried for saying something similar regarding American blacks. The Bell Curve has much more detailed support for an assertion like this.) I have proposed (by 80-85 genetic estimate contrasted to 70 observed) that environment accounts for a half to a third of the observed IQ difference. I don’t see anyone else really engaging with that argument.

I also think this restatement inadequately allows for subpopulation differences in either or both of genetics or environment. At one time Gabon had a French educated elite which I suspect would qualify on both counts. However, I don’t have enough knowledge of Africa in general and Gabon in particular to take a good look at this. What frustrates me is I believe Chanda has the expertise to check this hypothesis, but I have yet to see him do so in enough detail for me to dismiss it.

If, on the other hand, the cause is basically environmental (specifically, learning resource deficiencies), then some exceptions are bound to exist and these will predictably only be found in areas in which the cognitive challenges are high but the learning resource requirements (books, well-trained teachers etc) are extremely minimal. Performance on such cognitively demanding but bookless contests will far exceed even academic areas that are light on cognitive demands but heavy on book learning (eg soft subjects like sociology etc, where you still find no Africans at the top). The genetic Racial Hypothesis predicts that the gap should be even bigger in favor of whites as you go to the more naturally complex contests like Scrabble (see Spearman’s Hypothesis.) In short, if there was to be any exception to inferior African intellectual performance, it should have been in the softer fields where there are less of the gifted math types to contend with.

And here is where I really start having problems. First, more vagueness, starting with “basically environmental”. Second, “basically genetic/environmental” is a false dichotomy. A mix is clearly possible as well as the possibility of there being multiple causes as both szopen and I have proposed. Third, limiting environmental effects to “specifically, learning resource deficiencies”. I believe both culture and nutrition are significant environmental effects in Africa. This false dichotomy also ignores non-IQ genetic effects (e.g. specific other intellectual skills, or other traits like persistence).

“Performance on such cognitively demanding but bookless contests will far exceed even academic areas that are light on cognitive demands but heavy on book learning (eg soft subjects like sociology etc, where you still find no Africans at the top).” is supportable, and provides a guide to where to look. But, I think there needs to be more effort to look at both confirming and disconfirming (e.g. chess?) examples.

I basically agree with “The genetic Racial Hypothesis predicts that the gap should be even bigger in favor of whites as you go to the more naturally complex contests like Scrabble (see Spearman’s Hypothesis.)” but think this also needs to consider specific skills. For an analogy, consider American black dominance in “athletics.” This seems to be driven by specific skills (e.g. sprinting in West Africans) rather than some kind of overall “athletic g.” If you look closely sports vary in racial ability differences and I think this is attributable to differences in both genetic specific skill profiles and preferences (IMO the same is true of Scrabble).

“In short, if there was to be any exception to inferior African intellectual performance, it should have been in the softer fields where there are less of the gifted math types to contend with.” Rather than being a summary, this actually brings in another aspect to the issue. Earlier he talked about resource availability, here he is talking about the presence of competition. I discuss this above as “comparative advantage” and “other interests” and think it is an important point. The question is, how does elite Scrabble actually stack up here? Both in terms of ability profile and in terms of desirability for people with those abilities. As an analogy, I think it likely that the NBA draws most of the top basketball talent available in the US (and increasingly the world). It is much less likely speed skating draws most of the people best able to succeed in that sport. Which does Scrabble more resemble? What kind of other activities might someone who has top tier Scrabble potential engage in (in both Africa and the rest of the world)? For comparison we might consider chess. My experience has been that the nerdy math types tend to go for chess rather than Scrabble AND in more developed countries tend to use their math skills professionally which is time consuming.

I think an interesting question to explore would be what kinds of work activities are these Scrabble champions, and their families (to look at relevant specific genetic traits), engaged in and what kind of success are they achieving?

If it’s possible, I think a one paragraph summary of Chanda’s primary argument including testable assertions would be very helpful to this discussion.

No - my point was not that Scrabble requires intelligence in whites, but something else in Africans.

First of all, it does not seem like all top Scrabble players have IQ of 140, only that some have.

My hypothesis was much less controversial and it consists of three points

(1) Hypothetical differences in gaps

We know that the gaps on different cognitive abilities differ not just between whites and blacks, but also whites and east asians.

Hence, I speculated that maybe there is a set of abilities helpful with playing scrabble, let's call them "Sc", for example large working memory (and we know that when matched for IQ, american blacks have better working memory), quick numerical addition, some visual reasoning and so on. The "Sc" may be highly correlated with some math abilities - but "correlation" would not mean that there will be no people high on hypothetical "Sc", yet lacking other math skills.

"Sc" will be obviously "g" loaded. The question is then, will the g-loading be the same in whites and blacks?

What if to get the same score on hypothetical "Sc" one would have to get 115 in whites, but only 100 in blacks?

(2) Higher IQ scoresGabon can not have IQ score of 64 or even of 70. I speculate it must have higher score, in lower 80s. Obviously, Gabon would have to have higher IQ even with a model I proposed in previous installments of "scrabble oddyssey", where there would be a subpopulation with substantially higher average IQ than the general population. In fact, if the scrabble would indeed require IQ of 140, the size and/or average IQ of the postulated subpopulation would have to be big enough to raise average IQ of Gabon substantially, which is why previously I was against this hypothesis (Johan Meyer tries to save this hypothesis by saying "elites do not participate in the studies of IQ" which i find unlikely - note that at 140IQ threshold in his hypothesis there would be something like 3000 people potentially eligible to be top players without correcting for age).

(3) Expertise role Imagine that you can defeat some intelligence differences by experience and diminishing returns from higher intelligence (non-linear relation between IQ and ability to play scrabble).

That is, say that (pure speculation, of course) there is no way, realistically, one can defeat a difference between 70IQ and 140IQ. However, let's say that to defeat 115IQ, a person with 100IQ would have to train 5 hours per day more; while to defeat 130IQ, a person with 115IQ would have to train only 2 hours per day more and so on.

Yes, Europeans also could have train more, but the question is: what if Scrabble is more important to African players and Europeans, who have propensity to train the same number of hours, decide to invest their times in different games? What if at some level of play, once you pass minimal IQ threshold (or minimal "Sc" threshold), all that counts is the number of hours you train?

That is: say european with IQ140 finds out he can beat local scrabble competition with little training; so initially, at no-professional level, only IQ counts. Then he finds out that at some level IQ alone is not enough, starts training when starting facing really tough competition, at the professional level - where only level of hours count.

That would explain neatly even the scenario when Europeans players would have IQ high, while African not so; and that explanation would not even requires postulating that Africans are using different set of skills to achieve exactly the same what is achieved by European players by intelligence.

Per gender gap: there are differences in brain structure between females/males, and - as you surely know - there are differences on different subtests of cognitive abilities between males and females. Hence, if Scrabble calls for some specific subset of coginitive abilities, it may call on abilities where gender gap is larger than on "g". Even postulating "100" score for girls with smaller variation, and "105" for boys on that specific subset of hypothetical abilities, and a very modest "105" score for "being top player", you can calculate that there will be 5 boys for 3.6 girls. Since I don't know what "domination" of boys means, I cannot comment further.

To summarise: I agree you posted a valid problem which has to be explained. But I am not fully convinced the problem means we should ditch all the other evidence. I am also aware that I am speculating, but then - I do not feel ONE or two pieces of evidence pointing in one direction should be more important than a lot of evidence pointing in another direction.

No – my point was not that Scrabble requires intelligence in whites, but something else in Africans.

Indeed, Mr. Chisala and some of his supporters in the comments section at UNZ simply dont understand IQ and ironically, dont understand statistics 101 and are remiss at even a 9th grade level of mathematical averages and means.

The IQ of a country is the average score obtained *within that nation* on a written test of puzzles and mind teasers achieved by *selected test takers*. An IQ of 100 in the US and an IQ of 100 in another country can not be cross referenced because the samples are different.

This is not the place for me to write an article so let me try to disabuse the many whites who just cant let go of the notion that Africans are inherently dumber, by making a very simple observation that should be easier for you to understand.

60 Years ago the NBA was all white. There wasnt a Negro to be found shooting hoops. Today the NBA is nearly all black. Surely you are intelligent enough to see that race, genes and hereditary traits didnt change in 60 years time.

Russians do well at chess because it matters to them. American Jews do well on IQ tests because they try hard and judge themselves by it. Whites in America under-perform north east Asians on IQ tests because north east Asian kids spend more free time prepping. Both whites and Asians outspend blacks and hispanics 10 to 1 on test preparation, private tutoring, mock tests, summer camp, etc. If whites and Asians were intellectually superior to African Americans, they would not need to pop illicit brain pills before taking the SATs. Cheating also takes place on these tests. If people here want me to follow up with real articles, let me know. This topic is a blight on UNZ that just wont go away.

Once again, what do you not understand about “there are exceptions” and “g is nto everything”?

a reasonable person would assume you had said it at least "once" already.

Which you haven't.

But I will be patient.

By "there are exceptions" you would probably say (if you were sufficiently courteous as to explain) that you mean that there are exceptions to the rule that the mythical g, which cannot be directly measured and which has no known material basis, whether physiological, anatomical, or experiential, dictates that individuals will show uniform brightness or dimness in all cognitive domains.

So, yes, I do understand what you are struggling to articulate, but I reject what you suggest I fail to understand because it is based on a misconception.

And if g is a misconception, then there is nothing to understand in the contention that it "is nto (sic) everything."

there are exceptions to the rule that the mythical g, which cannot be directly measured and which has no known material basis, whether physiological, anatomical, or experiential, dictates that individuals will show uniform brightness or dimness in all cognitive domains.

No.
The individuals with higher “g” will TEND to show more brightness in all cognitive domains.

The individuals with higher “g” will TEND to show more brightness in all cognitive domains.

This is an axiom, correct? It can't be really verified. It has to be believed in. Because g is constructed form a battery of cognitive subtests. Circular thinking. Tautology. So you did not really say much. Actually you have said nothing.

No - my point was not that Scrabble requires intelligence in whites, but something else in Africans.

First of all, it does not seem like all top Scrabble players have IQ of 140, only that some have.

My hypothesis was much less controversial and it consists of three points

(1) Hypothetical differences in gaps

We know that the gaps on different cognitive abilities differ not just between whites and blacks, but also whites and east asians.

Hence, I speculated that maybe there is a set of abilities helpful with playing scrabble, let's call them "Sc", for example large working memory (and we know that when matched for IQ, american blacks have better working memory), quick numerical addition, some visual reasoning and so on. The "Sc" may be highly correlated with some math abilities - but "correlation" would not mean that there will be no people high on hypothetical "Sc", yet lacking other math skills.

"Sc" will be obviously "g" loaded. The question is then, will the g-loading be the same in whites and blacks?

What if to get the same score on hypothetical "Sc" one would have to get 115 in whites, but only 100 in blacks?

(2) Higher IQ scoresGabon can not have IQ score of 64 or even of 70. I speculate it must have higher score, in lower 80s. Obviously, Gabon would have to have higher IQ even with a model I proposed in previous installments of "scrabble oddyssey", where there would be a subpopulation with substantially higher average IQ than the general population. In fact, if the scrabble would indeed require IQ of 140, the size and/or average IQ of the postulated subpopulation would have to be big enough to raise average IQ of Gabon substantially, which is why previously I was against this hypothesis (Johan Meyer tries to save this hypothesis by saying "elites do not participate in the studies of IQ" which i find unlikely - note that at 140IQ threshold in his hypothesis there would be something like 3000 people potentially eligible to be top players without correcting for age).

(3) Expertise role Imagine that you can defeat some intelligence differences by experience and diminishing returns from higher intelligence (non-linear relation between IQ and ability to play scrabble).

That is, say that (pure speculation, of course) there is no way, realistically, one can defeat a difference between 70IQ and 140IQ. However, let's say that to defeat 115IQ, a person with 100IQ would have to train 5 hours per day more; while to defeat 130IQ, a person with 115IQ would have to train only 2 hours per day more and so on.

Yes, Europeans also could have train more, but the question is: what if Scrabble is more important to African players and Europeans, who have propensity to train the same number of hours, decide to invest their times in different games? What if at some level of play, once you pass minimal IQ threshold (or minimal "Sc" threshold), all that counts is the number of hours you train?

That is: say european with IQ140 finds out he can beat local scrabble competition with little training; so initially, at no-professional level, only IQ counts. Then he finds out that at some level IQ alone is not enough, starts training when starting facing really tough competition, at the professional level - where only level of hours count.

That would explain neatly even the scenario when Europeans players would have IQ high, while African not so; and that explanation would not even requires postulating that Africans are using different set of skills to achieve exactly the same what is achieved by European players by intelligence.

Per gender gap: there are differences in brain structure between females/males, and - as you surely know - there are differences on different subtests of cognitive abilities between males and females. Hence, if Scrabble calls for some specific subset of coginitive abilities, it may call on abilities where gender gap is larger than on "g". Even postulating "100" score for girls with smaller variation, and "105" for boys on that specific subset of hypothetical abilities, and a very modest "105" score for "being top player", you can calculate that there will be 5 boys for 3.6 girls. Since I don't know what "domination" of boys means, I cannot comment further.

To summarise: I agree you posted a valid problem which has to be explained. But I am not fully convinced the problem means we should ditch all the other evidence. I am also aware that I am speculating, but then - I do not feel ONE or two pieces of evidence pointing in one direction should be more important than a lot of evidence pointing in another direction.

Your speculative theory is statistically contradicted by the simple fact that the math majors are vastly over-represented among the extremely good players/champions. It should not be too difficult to completely exterminate such a tiny group from the top if what you say is true.

(1st speculation, scrabble-specific abilities, stronger) states that there might be abilities which are correlated with math abilities, on which there is a difference in gap between whites-black. E.g. "mental rotation" is correlated with math abilities, but maybe in different populations (a) the correlation is different (b) the difference in mental rotation between whites-gap is different that difference in "g"

(2nd speculation, self-selection of high IQ, much weaker) states that on the entrance to Scrabble, high IQ helps. I.e. on amateur level not many people train a lot, so IQ matters; hence to the professional level advance only high-IQ people (high in a given population). At the professional level, however, all that matters is how much do you train. It could be also, that the train hours would be more improtant in say Gabon, because there are not enough high-iq people to overcome the gap in train hours.

Sorry, English is not my native language, I will try to restate:

Say there is some cut-off level of IQ, over which all that matters is expertise (experience+time dedicated to scrabble), and before that, below that cut-off, higher IQ is important, then you got diminishing returns, and expertise matters more. And say you can invest more hours to defeat player with higher IQ, but initially, at amateur level, no one invest enough time, so higher IQ level players pass. All others are deterred from playing and resign.

Say in Gabon, no one has high IQ enough, and all it matters is the training, from the very beginning.

Well I got into Mensa with 132, but still can't figure out what Chisala's argument is. His articles seem a bit scattershot. If anyone could summarise the argument, I would be grateful.

I don’t have time now to summarize Chisala’s article for you, and anyhow, with an IQ of 132 you must be able to figure it out for yourself if you put your mind to it.

What I can tell are the conclusions I draw from the article and the discussion to which it has given rise:

Among those writing here, are some who maintain that Africans have a deficiency in something called g or general intelligence as evidenced by the generally low African IQ-test scores, commonly said to average between 65 and 75 versus around 100 for white Americans.

What this means is that there are some here who believe most Africans to be gamma-minus morons scarcely able to function at all, and certainly incapable of any form of real intellectual achievement. From this, it follows that if Africans excel at the game of Scrabble it can only be because Scrabble is a dumb game fit only for dumb people to play.

This view seems, however, to be incorrect, since among non-Africans, including Americans, who play Scrabble those who play best are generally high IQ people strong in mathematical ability, i.e., people believed to have plenty of g. So how is this seeming contradiction between the low IQ of African populations and the success of Africans at the — for non-Africans — high IQ game of Scrabble to be explained?

One possible answer is that IQ tests do not provide a cross-culturally, or cross-racially, valid measure of g. Thus African IQ test results are not comparable with non-African IQ test results. Another possibility is that Africans have a different mental aptitude profile to non-Africans, such that they have an exceptionally high Scrabble aptitude while being almost mentally deficient in most if not all other domains of intelligence.

The second alternative has at least some plausibility since we know that the within populations, the correlation coefficients among relative mental aptitude test scores are usually less than 0.7, meaning that population variation in aptitude of one kind typically explains less than 50% of the population variation in aptitude of another kind. Therefore, if Africans have a specially large Scrabble bump, they might indeed beat the world at Scrabble while performing in a relatively abysmal way on other kinds of mental challenge.

If it were in fact the case that Africans have a different ability profile to non-Africans, then what could account for this difference? There appear to be three categories of explanation: environmental, anatomical, or physiological.

Environment, for example, might be important if Africans, while having little in the way of schooling necessary to perform well at most verbal and mathematical aptitude tests, nevertheless gain abundant experience of Scrabble, by virtue of the fact that Scrabble is a wildly popular game among Africans.

An anatomical explanation, reflecting the modularity of the brain, would postulate that the mental bumps or modules of the African brain differ in their relative proportions to those of non-Africans. There is, however, no reputable anatomical evidence to support such a theory. However, one might postulate that a cultural factor, namely the popularity of Scrabble among Africans gives rise to reassignment of neural resources in the way that the prolonged wearing of a blindfold leads to the reassignment of the visual cortex to processing of non-visual information.

A physiological explanation for African achievement at Scrabble is truly difficult to envisage and I will not attempt to offer a suggestion of what might constitute such a theory.

Of the three possibilities, then, the first, an environmental or cultural factor affecting learned ability seems the most plausible explanation for a possibly different ability profile among Africans compared with non-Africans. However, cultural differences between Africans and non-Africans could lead to anatomical differences as the result of the reassignment of neural resources.

It thus seems necessary to conclude that success at competitive Scrabble requires high intelligence, and that the only way to explain the success of African Scrabble players in competition with non-Africans, despite the low reported IQ of Africans is due to cultural differences between Africans and non-Africans giving rise to either (1) IQ test results for Africans and non-Africans that are incommensurable, or (2) a culturally-driven difference between Africans and non-Africans in intellectual aptitude profile. I would put my money on (1).

The arguments seem backwards and that's why reading them is like going down a rabbit hole.

Rather than start with the idea of race differences, and shoe-horning scrabble into the mix, start with scrabble itself.

Who does scrabble appeal to? Well, one large group will be literary types, who love playing with words. People with such verbal aptitude will probably be better with numbers too.

So that's one group who it appeals to. But it's not necessarily who wins. Scrabble is largely about remembering 2 and 3 letter words and knowing the common ways to prepend and append words. This itself is not a particularly intellectual endeavour - it's just rote memorization.

So you will have two classes of professional scrabble player - those who enjoy staying up all night reading Jane Austen and those who are memorising the two letter words. One of these groups may have higher IQ, but they may occupy the same ability level when playing scrabble.

To be clear, the original typo was from szopen, I was merely inferring what he meant. This isn't the first time you have misattributed a comment to me. Not a big deal in this case, but I think it would help improve the harmony here if you made a bit more of an effort with that. Part of the problem seems to be when I comment on a cranky response from you and you assume I am the one who made the original comment.

And, adding to the confusion, I am mistakenly addressing res as the author of a comment by szopen.

But while we're talking of shoes and ships and sealing wax, what is this g thing? It seems to me that there's some motte and bailey about it. Is it a physical thing, like a brain, in which case I concede it exists, but that obviously does not differentiate a man from a mollusk, since both have a brain.

Or is it a measure of the size of a brain, in which case, which part of the brain? The brain has many parts and the different parts have different functions. So does high g mean having a general enlargement of the brain, and if so, how come Anatole France, Nobel Prize winner, was found at autopsy to have a brain weighing barely a kilogram?

Or is it something physiological: high glutamate, at the glutamatergic synapse, or low gaba at the gabaergic synapse, perhaps. But if so, how come autistics, people suffering a defect in the gabaergic transduction pathway, are so consistently uneven in aptitude profile, e.g., Derek Paravicini?

Far from their being some basic factor that links aptitude in one area with aptitude in all other areas, the evidence points to individual intellectual heterogeneity. True, there are rare polymaths (and Pollydopes, and Pollyaverages) but so one would expect if aptitude of every kind is randomly distributed. The fact that polymaths are the exception among geniuses is confirmed by the unenlightening tiresomeness of Nobel Prize winners, great actors, and pop stars who take to explaining to the world their views about Donald Trump, geopolitics, and climate change.

Your speculative theory is statistically contradicted by the simple fact that the math majors are vastly over-represented among the extremely good players/champions. It should not be too difficult to completely exterminate such a tiny group from the top if what you say is true.

WHy?

(1st speculation, scrabble-specific abilities, stronger) states that there might be abilities which are correlated with math abilities, on which there is a difference in gap between whites-black. E.g. “mental rotation” is correlated with math abilities, but maybe in different populations (a) the correlation is different (b) the difference in mental rotation between whites-gap is different that difference in “g”

(2nd speculation, self-selection of high IQ, much weaker) states that on the entrance to Scrabble, high IQ helps. I.e. on amateur level not many people train a lot, so IQ matters; hence to the professional level advance only high-IQ people (high in a given population). At the professional level, however, all that matters is how much do you train. It could be also, that the train hours would be more improtant in say Gabon, because there are not enough high-iq people to overcome the gap in train hours.

Sorry, English is not my native language, I will try to restate:

Say there is some cut-off level of IQ, over which all that matters is expertise (experience+time dedicated to scrabble), and before that, below that cut-off, higher IQ is important, then you got diminishing returns, and expertise matters more. And say you can invest more hours to defeat player with higher IQ, but initially, at amateur level, no one invest enough time, so higher IQ level players pass. All others are deterred from playing and resign.

Say in Gabon, no one has high IQ enough, and all it matters is the training, from the very beginning.

Both of your theories are falsified by the dominance of mathematiciansat the top.

Theory 1: If there is some ability that correlates with math ability, but does not actually make you good at math, hence permitting Africans with lots of x to be Scrabble champions, THEN the mathematicians would not be dominant even in America. Because whatever that x is, there will also be people in America who have it in abundance who are not mathematicians or are even bad at math. A strong selection on that factor x would make it harder for actual mathematicians to qualify.

For your theory to even have a remote chance of working, you have to make the further claim: that Africans have much more of this x than other populations. Your problem then, as a hereditarian, is that you will have no candidate among cognitive abilities for that x, because the hereditarian literature puts Africans way below other populations on just about any cognitive ability you would choose for such candidacy.

Theory 2: you're essentially saying that experience/training is much more important than intelligence, except among people who have little or no experience. Again, if this was true, you would not have that many mathematicians at the top. The fact that there are many other professions of people who play the game seriously and have lots of experience, and yet the mathematicians (and other high IQ professions) rise to the top falsifies your theory: it means that intelligence/math ability continues to be a significant factor even among the highly experienced people. If your theory was true, the mathematicians would dominate at the top only if they were already the majority of the experienced players.

[Note: I can repeat the logic similarly for Ashkenazi Jewish dominance, etc and show how Occam's razor alone makes any other speculations implausible. And I can also get into the game of checkers etc (an alternative hypothesis should integrate all that). But I don't want to end up re-writing my entire article(s) in the comments thread!]

“The analyses revealed that elite- and average-level rated players only significantly differed from each other on tasks representative of SCRABBLE performance. Furthermore, domain-relevant practice mediated the effects of SCRABBLE tournament ratings on representative task performance, suggesting that SCRABBLE players can acquire some of the knowledge necessary for success at the highest levels of competition by engaging in activities deliberately designed to maximize adaptation to SCRABBLE-specific task constraints. “

there are exceptions to the rule that the mythical g, which cannot be directly measured and which has no known material basis, whether physiological, anatomical, or experiential, dictates that individuals will show uniform brightness or dimness in all cognitive domains.

No.
The individuals with higher "g" will TEND to show more brightness in all cognitive domains.

TEND TO.

And there are other factors too, obviously.

The individuals with higher “g” will TEND to show more brightness in all cognitive domains.

This is an axiom, correct? It can’t be really verified. It has to be believed in. Because g is constructed form a battery of cognitive subtests. Circular thinking. Tautology. So you did not really say much. Actually you have said nothing.

I don't have time now to summarize Chisala's article for you, and anyhow, with an IQ of 132 you must be able to figure it out for yourself if you put your mind to it.

What I can tell are the conclusions I draw from the article and the discussion to which it has given rise:

Among those writing here, are some who maintain that Africans have a deficiency in something called g or general intelligence as evidenced by the generally low African IQ-test scores, commonly said to average between 65 and 75 versus around 100 for white Americans.

What this means is that there are some here who believe most Africans to be gamma-minus morons scarcely able to function at all, and certainly incapable of any form of real intellectual achievement. From this, it follows that if Africans excel at the game of Scrabble it can only be because Scrabble is a dumb game fit only for dumb people to play.

This view seems, however, to be incorrect, since among non-Africans, including Americans, who play Scrabble those who play best are generally high IQ people strong in mathematical ability, i.e., people believed to have plenty of g. So how is this seeming contradiction between the low IQ of African populations and the success of Africans at the — for non-Africans — high IQ game of Scrabble to be explained?

One possible answer is that IQ tests do not provide a cross-culturally, or cross-racially, valid measure of g. Thus African IQ test results are not comparable with non-African IQ test results. Another possibility is that Africans have a different mental aptitude profile to non-Africans, such that they have an exceptionally high Scrabble aptitude while being almost mentally deficient in most if not all other domains of intelligence.

The second alternative has at least some plausibility since we know that the within populations, the correlation coefficients among relative mental aptitude test scores are usually less than 0.7, meaning that population variation in aptitude of one kind typically explains less than 50% of the population variation in aptitude of another kind. Therefore, if Africans have a specially large Scrabble bump, they might indeed beat the world at Scrabble while performing in a relatively abysmal way on other kinds of mental challenge.

If it were in fact the case that Africans have a different ability profile to non-Africans, then what could account for this difference? There appear to be three categories of explanation: environmental, anatomical, or physiological.

Environment, for example, might be important if Africans, while having little in the way of schooling necessary to perform well at most verbal and mathematical aptitude tests, nevertheless gain abundant experience of Scrabble, by virtue of the fact that Scrabble is a wildly popular game among Africans.

An anatomical explanation, reflecting the modularity of the brain, would postulate that the mental bumps or modules of the African brain differ in their relative proportions to those of non-Africans. There is, however, no reputable anatomical evidence to support such a theory. However, one might postulate that a cultural factor, namely the popularity of Scrabble among Africans gives rise to reassignment of neural resources in the way that the prolonged wearing of a blindfold leads to the reassignment of the visual cortex to processing of non-visual information.

A physiological explanation for African achievement at Scrabble is truly difficult to envisage and I will not attempt to offer a suggestion of what might constitute such a theory.

Of the three possibilities, then, the first, an environmental or cultural factor affecting learned ability seems the most plausible explanation for a possibly different ability profile among Africans compared with non-Africans. However, cultural differences between Africans and non-Africans could lead to anatomical differences as the result of the reassignment of neural resources.

It thus seems necessary to conclude that success at competitive Scrabble requires high intelligence, and that the only way to explain the success of African Scrabble players in competition with non-Africans, despite the low reported IQ of Africans is due to cultural differences between Africans and non-Africans giving rise to either (1) IQ test results for Africans and non-Africans that are incommensurable, or (2) a culturally-driven difference between Africans and non-Africans in intellectual aptitude profile. I would put my money on (1).

Actually, I get a kick out of debating, and though that does not make me a genius debater, I think that what gives one a kick is what can make one an obsessive, and what makes one an obsessive, may make one a genius, even if one has perhaps only modest intellectual tools to work with. That, incidentally, is my theory of African world-class performance at Scrabble. And I would bet that give them time and the Africans will show similar world-class performance in other domains, as they have already in literature and the arts.

Speaking of genius and modest ability, Einstein, by his own admission, relied on friends to help him with math, e.g., Marcel Grossman, and later at Princeton, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th Century, Kurt Goedel. Thus aided, Einstein was able to pursue the implications of his obsessive attention to such questions as how the world would look to a photon, his achievements earning him a popular reputation as the most intelligent man in the world, a standing with probably little relation to Einstein's IQ.

“. Here we investigated the potential for far transfer to a symbol decision task (SDT); in particular, transfer of enhanced long-term working memory for vertically presented stimuli. Our behavioral results showed no evidence for far transfer. Despite years of intensive practice, Scrabble experts were no faster and no more accurate than controls in the SDT. However, our fMRI and EEG data from the SDT suggest that the neural repertoire that Scrabble experts develop supports task performance even outside of the practiced domain, in a non-linguistic context. ” … “, the neuroimaging results provide evidence of brain transfer in the absence of behavioral transfer, providing new clues about the consequences of long-term training associated with competitive Scrabble expertise.”

“players’ ratings are correlated with the number of years spent training (Halpern and Wai, 2007; Tuffiash et al., 2007). Furthermore, the enhanced skills of competitive players are attributed to their training activities and competitive play, rather than pre-existing differences in vocabulary, visuospatial, or other skills (Halpern and Wai, 2007; Tuffiash et al., 2007).”

Behind the paywall for me.
“Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr a week memorizing words from the official Scrabble dictionary. When asked if they learn word meanings when studying word lists, only 6.4% replied “always,” with the rest split between “sometimes” and “rarely or never.” Number of years of play correlated positively with expertise ratings, suggesting that expertise develops with practice”

Are you being disingenuous here? I think it’s clear the “nto” was meant to be “not”, but you seem to be interpreting it as “into”.

I didn't realize you were IQ-testing me. I thought you were mistyping. And, yes, I did, for some reason assume "NTO" meant "into," not "not." LOL

But it's good to know that we agree on something. Although not altogether, since I don't agree that g is anything, or can therefore be, in part or in whole, into or not into, anything else.

To be clear, the original typo was from szopen, I was merely inferring what he meant. This isn’t the first time you have misattributed a comment to me. Not a big deal in this case, but I think it would help improve the harmony here if you made a bit more of an effort with that. Part of the problem seems to be when I comment on a cranky response from you and you assume I am the one who made the original comment.

Are you being disingenuous here? I think it’s clear the “nto” was meant to be “not”, but you seem to be interpreting it as “into”.

I didn't realize you were IQ-testing me. I thought you were mistyping. And, yes, I did, for some reason assume "NTO" meant "into," not "not." LOL

But it's good to know that we agree on something. Although not altogether, since I don't agree that g is anything, or can therefore be, in part or in whole, into or not into, anything else.

And, adding to the confusion, I am mistakenly addressing res as the author of a comment by szopen.

But while we’re talking of shoes and ships and sealing wax, what is this g thing? It seems to me that there’s some motte and bailey about it. Is it a physical thing, like a brain, in which case I concede it exists, but that obviously does not differentiate a man from a mollusk, since both have a brain.

Or is it a measure of the size of a brain, in which case, which part of the brain? The brain has many parts and the different parts have different functions. So does high g mean having a general enlargement of the brain, and if so, how come Anatole France, Nobel Prize winner, was found at autopsy to have a brain weighing barely a kilogram?

Or is it something physiological: high glutamate, at the glutamatergic synapse, or low gaba at the gabaergic synapse, perhaps. But if so, how come autistics, people suffering a defect in the gabaergic transduction pathway, are so consistently uneven in aptitude profile, e.g., Derek Paravicini?

Far from their being some basic factor that links aptitude in one area with aptitude in all other areas, the evidence points to individual intellectual heterogeneity. True, there are rare polymaths (and Pollydopes, and Pollyaverages) but so one would expect if aptitude of every kind is randomly distributed. The fact that polymaths are the exception among geniuses is confirmed by the unenlightening tiresomeness of Nobel Prize winners, great actors, and pop stars who take to explaining to the world their views about Donald Trump, geopolitics, and climate change.

I don't have time now to summarize Chisala's article for you, and anyhow, with an IQ of 132 you must be able to figure it out for yourself if you put your mind to it.

What I can tell are the conclusions I draw from the article and the discussion to which it has given rise:

Among those writing here, are some who maintain that Africans have a deficiency in something called g or general intelligence as evidenced by the generally low African IQ-test scores, commonly said to average between 65 and 75 versus around 100 for white Americans.

What this means is that there are some here who believe most Africans to be gamma-minus morons scarcely able to function at all, and certainly incapable of any form of real intellectual achievement. From this, it follows that if Africans excel at the game of Scrabble it can only be because Scrabble is a dumb game fit only for dumb people to play.

This view seems, however, to be incorrect, since among non-Africans, including Americans, who play Scrabble those who play best are generally high IQ people strong in mathematical ability, i.e., people believed to have plenty of g. So how is this seeming contradiction between the low IQ of African populations and the success of Africans at the — for non-Africans — high IQ game of Scrabble to be explained?

One possible answer is that IQ tests do not provide a cross-culturally, or cross-racially, valid measure of g. Thus African IQ test results are not comparable with non-African IQ test results. Another possibility is that Africans have a different mental aptitude profile to non-Africans, such that they have an exceptionally high Scrabble aptitude while being almost mentally deficient in most if not all other domains of intelligence.

The second alternative has at least some plausibility since we know that the within populations, the correlation coefficients among relative mental aptitude test scores are usually less than 0.7, meaning that population variation in aptitude of one kind typically explains less than 50% of the population variation in aptitude of another kind. Therefore, if Africans have a specially large Scrabble bump, they might indeed beat the world at Scrabble while performing in a relatively abysmal way on other kinds of mental challenge.

If it were in fact the case that Africans have a different ability profile to non-Africans, then what could account for this difference? There appear to be three categories of explanation: environmental, anatomical, or physiological.

Environment, for example, might be important if Africans, while having little in the way of schooling necessary to perform well at most verbal and mathematical aptitude tests, nevertheless gain abundant experience of Scrabble, by virtue of the fact that Scrabble is a wildly popular game among Africans.

An anatomical explanation, reflecting the modularity of the brain, would postulate that the mental bumps or modules of the African brain differ in their relative proportions to those of non-Africans. There is, however, no reputable anatomical evidence to support such a theory. However, one might postulate that a cultural factor, namely the popularity of Scrabble among Africans gives rise to reassignment of neural resources in the way that the prolonged wearing of a blindfold leads to the reassignment of the visual cortex to processing of non-visual information.

A physiological explanation for African achievement at Scrabble is truly difficult to envisage and I will not attempt to offer a suggestion of what might constitute such a theory.

Of the three possibilities, then, the first, an environmental or cultural factor affecting learned ability seems the most plausible explanation for a possibly different ability profile among Africans compared with non-Africans. However, cultural differences between Africans and non-Africans could lead to anatomical differences as the result of the reassignment of neural resources.

It thus seems necessary to conclude that success at competitive Scrabble requires high intelligence, and that the only way to explain the success of African Scrabble players in competition with non-Africans, despite the low reported IQ of Africans is due to cultural differences between Africans and non-Africans giving rise to either (1) IQ test results for Africans and non-Africans that are incommensurable, or (2) a culturally-driven difference between Africans and non-Africans in intellectual aptitude profile. I would put my money on (1).

The arguments seem backwards and that’s why reading them is like going down a rabbit hole.

Rather than start with the idea of race differences, and shoe-horning scrabble into the mix, start with scrabble itself.

Who does scrabble appeal to? Well, one large group will be literary types, who love playing with words. People with such verbal aptitude will probably be better with numbers too.

So that’s one group who it appeals to. But it’s not necessarily who wins. Scrabble is largely about remembering 2 and 3 letter words and knowing the common ways to prepend and append words. This itself is not a particularly intellectual endeavour – it’s just rote memorization.

So you will have two classes of professional scrabble player – those who enjoy staying up all night reading Jane Austen and those who are memorising the two letter words. One of these groups may have higher IQ, but they may occupy the same ability level when playing scrabble.

Would Dustin Hoffman's "Rainman" have been good at Scrabble if interested? Just toying with the point that maybe Aspergerish or Idiot Savant types are suited to high performance Scrabble. Then the question arises as to their frequency in African countries. It fits with the ptedominance of males.

To be clear, the original typo was from szopen, I was merely inferring what he meant. This isn't the first time you have misattributed a comment to me. Not a big deal in this case, but I think it would help improve the harmony here if you made a bit more of an effort with that. Part of the problem seems to be when I comment on a cranky response from you and you assume I am the one who made the original comment.

I think it would help improve the harmony here if you made a bit more of an effort with that.

All harmony to be shortly restored with my comment currently, or until recently, awaiting moderation.

". Here we investigated the potential for far transfer to a symbol decision task (SDT); in particular, transfer of enhanced long-term working memory for vertically presented stimuli. Our behavioral results showed no evidence for far transfer. Despite years of intensive practice, Scrabble experts were no faster and no more accurate than controls in the SDT. However, our fMRI and EEG data from the SDT suggest that the neural repertoire that Scrabble experts develop supports task performance even outside of the practiced domain, in a non-linguistic context. " ... ", the neuroimaging results provide evidence of brain transfer in the absence of behavioral transfer, providing new clues about the consequences of long-term training associated with competitive Scrabble expertise."

"players' ratings are correlated with the number of years spent training (Halpern and Wai, 2007; Tuffiash et al., 2007). Furthermore, the enhanced skills of competitive players are attributed to their training activities and competitive play, rather than pre-existing differences in vocabulary, visuospatial, or other skills (Halpern and Wai, 2007; Tuffiash et al., 2007)."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17535133

Behind the paywall for me.
"Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr a week memorizing words from the official Scrabble dictionary. When asked if they learn word meanings when studying word lists, only 6.4% replied "always," with the rest split between "sometimes" and "rarely or never." Number of years of play correlated positively with expertise ratings, suggesting that expertise develops with practice"

Appeal to motive is a pattern of argument which consists in challenging a thesis by calling into question the motives of its proposer. It can be considered as a special case of the ad hominem circumstantial argument. As such, this type of argument may be an informal fallacy.

A common feature of appeals to motive is that only the possibility of a motive (however small) is shown, without showing the motive actually existed or, if the motive did exist, that the motive played a role in forming the argument and its conclusion. Indeed, it is often assumed that the mere possibility of motive is evidence enough.

If this is the case, as you propose, then all of the counter arguments to Lynn’s papers are to be thrown out because people of Southern Italian descent have problems with his “methodology”, they must have a motivation to disprove it because of feelings! I can day that Richard Lynn is a Nordicist and throw out the garbage he proposes. But looking at the data is better, because it’s a joke. PISA is not an IQ test bro. It’s strongly predicated on school environment. Don’t believe me? Read some of the responses to Richard Lynn’s papers on the matter.

When people use fallacious arguments, it shows their attitude—or lack thereof—in what is being discussed.

Actually, I get a kick out of debating, and though that does not make me a genius debater, I think that what gives one a kick is what can make one an obsessive, and what makes one an obsessive, may make one a genius, even if one has perhaps only modest intellectual tools to work with. That, incidentally, is my theory of African world-class performance at Scrabble. And I would bet that give them time and the Africans will show similar world-class performance in other domains, as they have already in literature and the arts.

Speaking of genius and modest ability, Einstein, by his own admission, relied on friends to help him with math, e.g., Marcel Grossman, and later at Princeton, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th Century, Kurt Goedel. Thus aided, Einstein was able to pursue the implications of his obsessive attention to such questions as how the world would look to a photon, his achievements earning him a popular reputation as the most intelligent man in the world, a standing with probably little relation to Einstein’s IQ.

I side with your theory of Scrabble in Africa. I used to tutor people for entrance exams to university in phys and math many years ago when I was in college. It was then that I realized that knowing physics and mathematics was nothing really special. I could teach almost anybody as long as they worked a lot. Often they were motivated by fear of their parents. Parents were ambitious and had aspirations for their children so they were hiring an expensive tutor. On few occasions I thought I was dealing with a moron but after one year of work 2-3 times a week (and him applying himself) he could pass quite competitive entrance exam. I do not know if I could be so successful in Africa. If I were younger I would try. But I would not touch African Americans. With the prevalent attitude they have it is really pointless.

Einstein? I looked into it lots of times. Origins of Relativity was my hobby some years ago. I read papers by the predecessors: Lorentz and Poincare and have no doubt that some plagiarism occurred. More and more I have doubts about his alleged genius or even originality. General Relativity certainly is a great achievement but w/o Grossman and probably w/o lifting Hilbert's result it would be a different story. Certainly he had a talent how to use people and the people apparently did not mind to remain unacknowledged and forever in shadows.

Feynman? After what you wrote about him I started looking into it. He was a showman. Very strong ego and extremely competitive. He wanted to shine and give impression that things were coming easy to him and that he did not really care. But he actually worked very hard on everything just to shine. He practice his antics at home and kept formulating his saying and editing them before he uttered them "spontaneously." So he cared very much. Not necessarily for the truth itself by for being right every time. If he did not go to physics perhaps he could have a career in Borscht Belt where he could have the last word as a stand up. Lot's of chutzpah and manipulation.

Their IQ's do not interest me as I consider this whole IQ business really of secondary importance. Yes, it is important if you want to join MENSA, an organization for people whose only accomplishment is being members of MENSA. It is the personality and moral stature of people like Einstein and Feynman that are really interesting.

The individuals with higher “g” will TEND to show more brightness in all cognitive domains.

This is an axiom, correct? It can't be really verified. It has to be believed in. Because g is constructed form a battery of cognitive subtests. Circular thinking. Tautology. So you did not really say much. Actually you have said nothing.

No. Because you construct “g” from tests of A, B, C, and use it to predict performance on D, E, F, G… So no circular thinking here.

you construct “g” from tests of A, B, C, and use it to predict performance on D, E, F, G…

Predict all you like, but how accurately can you predict?

With a coefficient of determination of less than 0.5, your predictions aren't worth a lot, and the correlations your are depending on must in part be due to cultural factors. If you went to school with